Bananas

Carol Condon
carolcondon5@aol.com

We all have our unique ways of searching for the perfect selections of fresh fruit to purchase for our families each week. How does a person choose the perfect fruit? While shopping I have seen people squeezing, sniffing, tapping and even tasting before they decide to place the fruit into their shopping basket or back onto the shelf.

Mark is pretty narrow-minded when it comes to adding fruits into his daily diet. He does like bananas though. So they are a weekly purchase for our family. I look at the bananas closely and try to choose the perfect bunch. There needs to be just enough green in order to last for a few days and no brown on them at all so that I can be assured of a bruise free banana.

After a day or two, despite my close observation before purchasing them, I’ll see a random bruise forming on the outside of the peel and I then realize that this banana will have an area that will not taste nearly as good and if it is not dealt with quickly will soon affect the entire banana. How did that bruise get there when yesterday it was a great specimen of a banana, or from the outside it looked like one?

It could have happened in a variety of ways. Maybe it had been dropped, squeezed too hard, mishandled by the previous shopper, or packed too tightly into a box. Whatever happened eventually caused damaged to the inside and the effects are now evident on the outside.

What about ourselves? We can look great from the outside but have hurts on the inside. Eventually, these hurts will manifest themselves on the outside if they are not properly dealt with. Maybe we were dropped, squeezed too hard, mishandled, or even pushed into a box outside of our comfort zone.

Oh, we are usually so confident that we can “handle” it and we make sure that from the outside no one would ever guess. However, over time it will proclaim itself. What if the bruise begins to show itself just when someone is shopping for a new friend, some answers, or a new church? What if they finally began to search for the Jesus that they had once seen in our lives? Well they observe us for a moment only to set us back on the shelf?