The title of my first book will be "Three Bananas," the sordid truth of which will detail my days at home while my wife worked and I tended to tasks on the domestic front. Three bananas is the usual request for Cindy, my wife, who will eat half a banana each day for lunch at school. So, when I'm menu planning and getting the grocery list together, she always writes down "three bananas."
It is called sordid because it will play a hand in the narrative of this fictional piece of a husband who assumes the role of shopper and goes to the store to buy groceries, general merchandise, dairy, produce, frozen foods, and maybe an item from the deli before he goes his merry way (that, by the way, is the break down of your United grocery receipt...read it for yourself). Yet each time I go to the produce section to get "three bananas," I note the bunches of bananas are in clusters of 6 - 7 bananas, so either I break the seal and take three bananas OR I take three bananas from the small bin where others have done the same.
Such is the life in the fruit area in the produce section of the store. Everyone touching your food before you finally buy it and take it home. Yet, we accept the risk because fruit is by and large healthy for us. My dilemma ends at the purchase because even though I run, I refuse to eat a banana, a food rich in potassium, which is a great anti-cramping chemical in your blood. So the "three bananas" are all Cindy's.
Fruit dots the landscape in scripture as well. Fruit first gets introduced to us at the fall of man when Satan inquires about the stipulations of living in Eden, the only one of which Eve answers, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" (Genesis 3:2 - 3) Fruit, for the most part in the New Testament, is equated to the productive life of a disciple. In Matthew 21, Christ approaches a fig tree with "nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, 'May no fruit ever come from you again.' And the fig tree withered at once." The lesson of which is fairly simple about our use if we bear no "fruit."
We struggle with this as Christians, the notion of salvation through faith, but that we will be judged by our actions as Christ asserts in Matthew 25 when he completes the narrative by saying, "Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." (25:40)
What fruit do we produce? Where is our faith life in that balance known as justified by faith, but in response to the gift of salvation, sharing the good news with others and reaching out to help those in our midst? Pray we seize moments when we can make a difference in our daily lives. Pray we take those opportunities as they come to us. Pray we are fruitful disciples in all we do.
Hope Men's Ministry
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