In Season

Fruit in season - it is just about time for some of my favorite fruits to hit the market. I love cherries, sweet watermelon, and cool honeydew. When fruit comes in season, I snatch it up, as I am a big fruit eater. During the 'leaner' fruit season of winter, I only have a select few fruits to choose from, such as bananas, apples, and oranges. Now, as summer is approaching, the markets are beginning to fill with fresh berries, melons, peaches, pears, and the list goes on. The bountiful harvest of fruit is something I look forward to, while the 'leaner' times are something I endure.

The wicked envy what the evil plunder, but the root of the right-living produces fruit for all. (Proverbs 12:12)

Fruit isn't just 'there' - it has to be produced in season. We don't find watermelon grows very well when the ground is covered with snowy ice, nor trees laden with peaches or plums when there is an absence of leaves in the frightful cold of winter. There is a season to the 'production' of fruit - complete with all the right 'conditions' being met. In our lives, there are seasons of growth - times when the 'conditions' are just right for the fruit to be produced. During these seasons, it is time to allow for the production of fruit in full abundance, not just one little bit!

Fruit is produced because there is a good root system established. If you think about it, we don't 'put down roots' easily, do we? We kind of resist growth sometimes, like when we encounter hard places that make our roots a little more difficult to 'put down'. It isn't that we don't want to grow, but the effort to overcome the 'hard places' is most demanding. We must have some spiritual substance to endure those 'leaner times' where growth is the hardest and the challenges to grow put obstacles in our way. This 'substance' comes in the weirdest of ways sometimes - but it is what will keep us on the path that moves us into the seasons of fruit production.

Perhaps the 'substance' we need to grow right now is that which will help to spur us on, even helping us to move the obstacle, or find a path that embraces it and sets roots that encompass the obstacle. If you have ever had a root system break a pipe in your yard, you know just how 'encompassing' those roots can be. They don't allow the obstacle of the pipe to get in their way - they embrace that obstacle and allow it to give them even greater 'anchorage'. That 'substance' may be found in times of prayer, reading of the Word, or just in contemplative silence before God. We don't know how to overcome the obstacles until we seek his wisdom in doing so.

If roots were easily set, we'd see all kinds of growth in our lives, without measure. Roots are set in some of the toughest of seasons - when our lives are said to be the 'driest', and the season seems to be the 'bleakest'. We don't know the obstacles in our path, but we can embrace them and see them become the foundation for even greater growth in our lives. What we choose to do with the things that push against our spiritual 'root system' will determine the fruit that is produced in season in our lives! Just sayin!

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