Bruised Fruit

I cannot be the only one to have loved playing “shops” when I was young. Emptying out the kitchen cupboards of all the food we had and setting up a stall in the front room to which imaginary customers would come to buy it all.

My friend Alan and I decided we would set up a Green Grocers shop. So we got the wheelbarrow out of my garden shed and went round the shops in our neighbourhood collecting the fruit that the Grocers would be unable to sell because they were bruised. We collected loads. We especially loved peaches and ate most of them ourselves. But the rest we put out on a table to give away to people who were passing by . We made a shop sign which read “A&A’s Grocers – Bruised Fruit Free of charge”

Now, as you can imagine some people passed us by on the other side of the road, but many did stop and visit our funny little shop and when they had selected their fruit we would cut out the bruise with our little pen knives and then hand the produce to our customer. (and neither of us had passed the basic food hygiene certificate level 1)

So the fruit we handed out was all different shapes and sizes by the time we’d finished cutting it about. Not always making a very good job of it either!

In this morning’s harvest gifts – you’ll struggle to find any fruit that would be fit for “A&A’s Grocers” the quality is far too high.

But what of us? – for harvest is about making an offering of our lives as much as it is about collecting together fruit and vegetables. The reality is that each of us is bruised fruit.

You can probably think of times when you’ve been hurt and a great black bruise has started to come up somewhere on your body, I can recall a cricket ball smashing into my face and several kicks on the legs in football,  but deep inside of us there are other bruises which never show like that because it’s our hearts that are getting hurt and torn about.

And actually it’s that sort of bruising that makes us into the shape of person we are.

Today, we think of all those who are fighting in wars and for those who end up losing their lives and we think of their families too – especially we think of James and his family and those who served with him.

We look around and wonder where God is when people are really hurting and in the Old Testament, way before Jesus was born we find an important clue “He was bruised”. God does not stand outside of our hardest times. In Christ he shares the experience with us, suffers alongside of us.

Then, in the fullness of time – he takes our lives , all cut about as they are, he holds the bruised fruit in his hands and makes it whole again.

Rh11.10.09