God's Diverse Orchard

Photo image courtesy Pixabay

”And God said, “I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.”

– Genesis 1:29 (RSV)

In Maine, where I live, you find huge old apple trees everywhere. They stand near the stone foundations of long-fallen homes and grow next to historic city houses. They edge vacant lots that used to be fields and spread into the woods nearby. So many overhang rural streets that, every fall, you can grab enough fruit from roadways to make an entire freezer full of applesauce.

Mainers have been planting apple trees for centuries because apples grow well here and are easily stored through the long winters. That way, long before the first supermarket was invented, we could have fresh fruit with our meals even when snow covered the ground.

Maine’s historic apples are also exceptionally diverse. More than 360 distinct varieties are still grown. That diversity happened because in the same way that no two people have the same DNA, no two apple seeds have the same DNA. The seeds from just one apple can grow a dozen entirely unique apple trees that will produce utterly different fruit.

Those different apples all ripen on their own schedules. At a U-Pick orchard, you can get Maine apples from early August through the end of October. But some apples aren’t even ripe when the first fall frost closes the orchards. Those apples are harvested and stored for months until they finally ripen in March or April. If you try to eat them earlier, you’d spit out the bitter flesh, not recognizing them as having even the potential to be good food.

That’s how God made the apple. It lives in hundreds of different varieties, of which are each able to produce ever more varieties. It's good for food, and full of seeds to produce fruit over many human generations.

The spiritual fruit God grows is much the same. We give it just a few names: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal 5:22-23). But each of these fruits produces a diversity of seeds that grow into endless varieties of spiritual fruit, all of which are good spiritual food. So gentleness may come in the form of tenderness, carefulness, or caution. Patience might appear as composure, diligence, endurance, fortitude, grit, humility, moderation, perseverance, persistence, restraint, or tolerance, depending on the day’s needs. In all these forms, God is still growing His spiritual fruit.

So even if you never get to enjoy a Black Oxford, a Newtown Pippin, or a Roxbury Russett, you can still enjoy cultivating the many forms of spiritual fruit God gives to our world through your life.

Questions for Reflection:

1. Can you describe more than one variety of patience or self-control that God has grown in your life? Are there multiple varieties of other spiritual fruit that you can see growing?

2. What spiritual fruit have you tried to “eat” (or serve to others) before it was ripe? What happened?

3. Do you have spiritual fruit “in storage” while you wait for it to ripen? How are you practicing patience in the meantime?