Thank you for these strawberries.
I am grateful for their touch of color in my routine breakfast, and for their hint of summer – the lush, verdant fields of June so far from the present winter’s ascetic slumber as to be almost unimaginable.
But thank you, even more for the unfulfilled promise of this fruit. Red as real but betrayed by their blandness. They are just imposters, stand-ins, tricking the eye but not the tongue. Still, I eat them. And as I do, I dream of what they ought to be.
You tell me that this world is like that. A promise unfulfilled. A pale foretaste of the reality you intended. Its beauty, at times breathtaking, is still a weak-tea dilution of the glory to be revealed when you come to reign and reveal. The same is true for our relationships, our knowledge of you, our clarity of purpose, our worship. As if you say, “If you like this, just wait…”
So, as I crunch on what should be soft and sweet, I am grateful for the reminder.
The better berries are yet to come.
Reader, as you can see, I’m trying something new.
For the foreseeable future, I’ll be creating shorter, simpler entries focused on little things in my life through the lens of gratitude. This is still true to my goal of being more aware of God’s presence all around me, but more manageable to write.
And, hopefully, more reproducible. My hope is that we can all be more aware of, more grateful for, God’s goodness and grace evidenced in our daily lives.
So, I’ll try this out. Let’s see where this takes us!
Feel free to let me know what you think.
Email me at bvanpatter@ailbe.org. And if you liked this, please use the buttons above to share it.
