I was fortunate and blessed to be able to attend a conference last October. One of the speakers, to be honest, seemed to bore me when he started out. Then what he did made me think. He had us draw a grid on a piece of paper. And he asked us to write some things down. I can’t remember all of the directions. However, he said, “I’m going to say a word. Write down the first thing that comes to your mind.”
Here we go, I thought. The man says the word “apple.” Immediately, I think PIE! Apple pie is one of the first things I learned to bake. I can think back and remember the feel of the apple in my hand as I peel it. I can hear the sound as I slice it up. I can smell the tartness and the smell as if it was baking right then. All the cinnamon and sugar. I can see it in and freshly out of the oven, a fresh slice with melting vanilla ice cream on the plate. Golden flakey crust, Yummy gooey filling. I remember the taste.
He went on to talk about how we all dream differently, and how some use only a couple of senses but some all. Apparently, I use all of mine. I never knew this about myself. It turned out to be one of my favorite talks at the conference. We can all learn something new if we get past ourselves, right?
Then, about a month ago, I started thinking about that experience, and something else came to my mind. Now, I know we don’t have any definitive proof of the fruit Adam and Eve ate, but traditionally, it was an apple.
How awesome is this? God can take a fruit, that if we choose to eat it after being told not to eat it, can basically ruin our lives, and turn it into one of the most yummy, wonderful, all senses filling, food. I mean think about it. You see a beautiful big red apple. It is just hanging from a tree. It is waiting to be eaten. Someone says, you can eat whatever you want here, just not that apple. I have this beautiful plan for you. Your life will be wonderful and blessed if you don’t eat that apple. So what do we do? We pick and eat the cotton picking apple. We make a choice. We walk up to it, reach out our hand, pick the apple, and take a bite.
Instantly, regret and shame enter our lives. We now have to experience and navigate things we were never created to. We are also separated from our creator. We have made it so we have to use go betweens to communicate with God.
But…
God sent His Son. I know this may seem simple, but this makes me think about the pie. I can go pick or buy a bag of apples and make a beautiful pie. I get to use the things that God created in me to experience that pie. He took a very unfortunate thing, and made it not just beautiful, but delicious.
Jesus went to the cross. He died and rose again. All the choices I made, all the unfortunate things that have happened to and around me that were not my fault but that I couldn’t control, on that day, were made whole and clean. I can say this. I will never look at an apple pie the same way again. It is just one of many examples of how God turns ashes into beauty.
There is just nothing like apple pie!
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