Bananas!!!

Bananas. I truly get joy from bananas!!! I think bananas are the perfect food! I just love the way God made bananas! And to me, they symbolize God’s perfect simplicity in a complex and chaotic world:

The banana…God’s perfect food.
It comes pre-wrapped, no washing needed.
It’s portable.
You need nothing but your hands and mouth to prepare it and eat it.
As it ripens the flavor changes, so you can pick your favorite time to eat it.
It doesn’t taste like other fruits…it tastes FATTENING!!!
It’s unique among fruits. God could definitely get a patent on this one!

Our relationship with God…perfect simplicity
It requires only one washing, but then we stay clean, even if we are dropped in the dirt once in awhile.
It is portable…we can take God with us anywhere we go.
You need nothing but your heart to prepare it and eat of it.
As you ripen, your flavor grows!
It’s not like anything else…it is completely satisfying.
It’s completely unique among other belief systems…God gives perfect grace, no human could have thought of it!

A little extra joy-burst: Another thing I love about bananas…that was my son’s FIRST word…NANA! He ate one every morning… and I would dance it across the highchair tray and sing the Sesame Street song “One Banana.” We were in the grocery store and as we passed the bananas he said it, “NANA!” I thought I was hearing things since he was only 10 ½ months old, so I went up and down a few aisles and walked past again…and he said it again. We did that several times until I was convinced!
“…I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.” Psalm 13:5

COMPOST!

As many of you know, I took horticultural classes last spring to become a Master Gardener. Believe me...it sound MUCH more impressive than it is! My fellow MG's are really into composting. They really laid it on thick when they found out I have an endless supply of dead leaves in my yard...they continually asked why I wasn't saving my kitchen and garden waste and making a big compost pile. After a while I began to feel guilty because I didn't compost! But I resisted. Just what I needed...a pile of rotting waste in my backyard!!!

But as the months went by, and I learned more about this "black gold" that everyone was raving about, I decided that once the fall came, and it was time to pull out all the old flowers, and the dead leaves would be plentiful, I would give this composting thing a go. The next question was...what was I going to use to store this pile of refuse! You can spend well over $100 on a fancy composter, or you can build bins...the list goes on and on. But since Dave's employment future is still uncertain I figured I'd go as economical as possible and just use glorified chicken wire and stakes. So over the weekend I built my compost bin...I am VERY proud of it...it gave me GREAT joy! In the next couple of days I'm going to start filling it. The leaves are falling, my flowers are ready to be yanked out, and I'm even saving veggie scraps in my fridge! I can use fireplace ashes, paper, all kinds of waste! YIPPIE! If you pile it up the right way, add the right amount of water, in a few days it starts to give off heat, the worms show up...and wa-la... In a few months you've got the black gold! My flower beds are just waiting to suck up all that nutrient rich stuff!

I'm an analogy person...if you know me, you know I like to make an analogy for everything...I'm a visual person, so word pictures really work for me. I couldn't help but get to thinking about this compost pile, and life....isn't this what a Christian life looks like...you take all your waste, the dead stuff, the rotting stuff, the stuff you should just throw away...and God can take all that and transform it into something really valuable, and then He can even use it to nourish others! (Notice it also takes some WATER to get all of this going!)

Keeping this analogy is mind will help me to be JOYFUL even when I'm tending to this worm laden pile of decomposing stuff!!! Rejoice in the Lord always!!!

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" 2 Corinthians 5:17