Clarity, Purity, and Beauty
If you grow a healthy tree, you’ll pick healthy fruit. If you grow a diseased tree, you’ll pick worm-eaten fruit. The fruit tells you about the tree. (Matthew 12:33) If you have mastered this art of jelly-making, you know under-ripe fruit that is too green actually makes the jelly a little cloudy in appearance. It affects the clarity of the jelly. The fruit must be ripe, but firm - not too mushy. If it is too green, it does not go through the "straining" process well. If still too green, it will cook down to what you think will make a good jelly, but you will have to exert too much pressure on it to get the juices out of it in the straining process. It actually makes the resulting "juice" for the jelly very cloudy. If you have ever tried to "force" fruit from your life (or had someone else trying to do it for you) - producing some semblance of "jelly-quality juice" from your life - you might have seen some of the issues of being "squee