Fruit. We're supposed to produce fruit, right? Is that something we're supposed to actively work towards or is it a passive activity? And what if the fruit you think you're producing ends up being the wrong kind of fruit? Not every fruit is helpful and not every season is a season for fruit. Or maybe every fruit is good in its own way.
Excuse me while I mumble to myself about whether or not I'm producing good fruit in this season. I realise that talking about 'good fruit' is such a Christian concept. The Bible is loaded with fruit forward imagery (pardon the wine analogy, another loaded Biblical image) and as Christians, we are obsessed with fruit.
"every healthy tree bears good fruit"
"a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit"
"a good man will be filled with the fruit of his ways"
"the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life"
I could go on indefinitely with verses about fruit but you get it. Whether you're a Christian or not, living a life that bears good fruit is important to us all. It's important for the goodness of the world, our families and our inner lives. For me and my house, it's producing fruit that brings love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22) that's important. These are only possible through Jesus because I do not possess any of them in my own strength and left to my own devices I will always resort back to behaviours which do not exhibit peacefulness, patience and gentleness. I am not naturally any of those things, if I'm honest.
If I'm honest, I find the love and joy and self-control fruits pretty easy. Those are generally healthy fruits in me. However, the other ones have seasons of healthy fruiting and seasons where that fruit is diseased and really struggles or may be completely non-existent.
When I start writing these blog posts sometimes I have no direction on what I'm going to write about. Sometimes, like in this case, I see an image and it sparks a word or a phrase in me that I feel led to explore. Today's prompt was rather obvious seeing as the images are of fruit: one of which is my favourite fruit in the world - the fig.
What I tend to find is that in allowing myself to freeform write I end up revealing a lesson I need to hear. Maybe right now, my lesson is that even when it seems like the tree is dormant it is still working under the surface to create good fruit or bad fruit and I get to choose which.
Every season has the possibility of producing character traits in us that are bad. We could be going through a really good season when it's easy to have joy, peace, patience, and goodness but because life is good we let self-control slip. Before we know it we've allowed behaviours in that don't produce good fruit.
Likewise we could be in a really hard season where it would be really easy for bad fruit to grow because it takes so much more effort to prune who we are in the face of battering storms and gales. Who wants to trim branches when just withstanding the storm is trial enough? But it's exactly in those times when the foundation is laid for the good fruit to come. Bad times do not last forever, they ebb and flow and one day you will find yourself on the other side of it. When that day comes, do you want to say that you weathered it well and produced character that lasts? Or do you want to allow the storm to beat you into someone who is in turmoil, lacks joy, impatient, and harsh?
Nobody gets to choose whether we go through hard times or not. We're human. It's a given. But what we do get to choose is how we weather those storms. Only you get to decide if the fruit you produce will be good and life-giving or whether it will be bad and damaging.
