Good fruit

Tonight I took my boys out for a walk, not for pleasure, oh no. This was a desperate attempt to wear them out and I might have been praying the baby would fall asleep on the way home. But as we were walking my son was exploring in all his four year old glory. He found leaf cutter ants and crouched down so he could take it all in. He tried to see if they would think his finger was food, but they were not fooled. 😉

We continued walking and he kept picking up rocks and throwing them in the stroller and acting as if they were the best treasures. We live on a dirt road. We have rocks EVERYWHERE and every couple inches he’s picking up another and throwing it in for me to push around. I sent him off to go explore something else because I was getting annoyed with the load I was pushing.

He stopped to admire the mango tree. He wasn’t trying to pull one off as I thought he would be, he wasn’t looking for a ripe one, but instead he was drawn right away to an old dried shriveled up mango still on the tree. It obviously had been stunted in its growth and rotted out. He touched it and said, “Hey, there’s nothing in it! It just cracked!” Before I knew it words were coming out of my mouth. To be honest the day had been long. It started way too early and I had been running since the boys woke me up. I wasn’t in a great mood or even place to be honest. But my mouth was moving and I knew God wasn’t just speaking to my son, he was speaking to me. What I found myself saying was this.

“Sometimes our hearts get hard and dried up because they aren’t full of Jesus. We can’t grow without his love. We can’t grow and be good fruit without him. But when we love Jesus, and he’s in our heart, we become good fruit. We grow. We grow patience, kindness and goodness. We aren’t empty and dried up. We grow into good fruit like the other mangos.”

He looked at me and said, “ok, mommy” and ran off down the road looking for more rocks.

I want to be like Jordan, eyes full of wonder, exploring the world and hearing God’s voice through nature and not even seeming surprised but just replying with, “ok, Abba!”