Strawberries

I usually like to go and pick my own strawberries every spring because it's my one time of year to pretend like I am a farm girl. I bring them home and eat some and make freezer jam and enjoy it all year long. In my next life, I'm going to come back as a happy farm wife who bakes pies and bread every day, tends her garden, sleeps on sheets that have hung to dry outside on the clothes line and lives in a big, beautiful old farm house with a red-checked table cloth on the kitchen table and a jar full of homemade cookies. My children will frolick happily on the farm and play in the tire swing and we'll never leave the farm because we'll have no need.

(Don't ruin my dream telling me I'll have to get up at 4:00 in the morning to milk cows and about the blisters on my hands from the garden hoe!)

This year I hadn't the time nor the inclination to pick strawberries myself, so I just stopped at a local roadside stand and bought some. It wasn't as emotionally satisfying, but still a step up from buying them at Kroger.

Now, God knew that we needed to eat as humans to fuel our bodies and he provided all sorts of options and variety for us to eat. He could have just created one kind of fruit and one kind of vegetable and said, "Here, live on this", but he was thoughtful and kind enough to provide variety and I sometimes think that the strawberry is the supreme example of this loving provision... the perfect strawberry is deep red, with little seeds all over it and a green stem. It is sweet and juicy and, picked and eaten straight off the plant after sitting in the warm sun, one of the most heavenly natural experiences there is. True, we are capable of doing all sorts of things to our food to "improve" on it... we are even known to dip our strawberries in chocolate! That's okay. But when you take away our improvements and it is just us and the earth that provides us with food, you have to admit that strawberries are a special gift. Only a loving God would think to provide them.

Isn't he cool?