Go Figure

 

The garden soft fruit, cultivated so carefully, has been disappointing this year. The canes which used to yield juicy, sweet raspberries, have barely produced. Not enough for jam, that’s for sure.

But the wild ones! Yes, admittedly, it took me over an hour to collect a couple of pounds of the tiny red rasps on a walk the other day, but I’ve got them now, and I’m about to head to the kitchen to make the resulting jam. Those tiny berries, so time-consuming to pick, so sweet and juicy.

Go figure, as my American friends say. Same weather, within a mile of our garden. Rubbish dirt never fed nor watered, and yet the wild ones proliferate and the husbanded ones wither.

Sometimes our most carefully cultivated friendships, or even our diligent efforts to raise Christ-centred children, don’t seem to yield results. We look around, crestfallen, to see wild shoots bearing fruit for eternity. As Tennyson wrote, and my dear dad often quoted, ‘ours not to reason why; ours but to do and die’.

I can’t make sense of it, but I know someone who can. Over to Him. I’m off to make the jam.