Thoughts from an Apple Pie

Sometimes it may seem that our hearts are sawed right in half.

 I was skimming through an old diary of many years ago this afternoon, searching for a name I had forgotten.

And read page after page of heart anguish--day after day when I was in my early 20's, of our family in fasting and prayer for a situation. 

Me crying in the attic--or in the basement--or walking the fields. 

Surrendering to God--despite the pain.

I knew I could never write about it all--just bits and pieces. 

But now, years later, all I can feel is gratitude at what God did through the years in answer to all those prayers and surrenderings despite the pain.

Sometimes all we can see is the rotten parts of things--like the bad parts of apples that have dropped from Grandpa and Grandma's tree.

 It takes a different person, a different eye, a different viewpoint, a different perspective

to see the same apples from the other side.

The very same apples.

 God has His mysterious ways of seeing the upperside of things we can only see the underside of.

He knows how much He wants to take those imperfect apples--

those drops from the tree--

maybe the dropouts from school or church or jobs or situations--

maybe the lives where the bottom has dropped out from underneath us, 

or the situations where our hearts drop into our shoes...

 and turn them into something edible, something beautiful, something good.

He takes the knife to cut out the bad--

And how skilled He is to carefully preserve the good

because He knows there is worth in that dropped apple--

the imperfect apple that dropped from the tree a little too early and rolled about in the dirt, hiding with dozens of others in the shade of garden weeds.

What others scorn, reject, and throw away--God chooses. 

He loves to find the hidden apple drops--and turn them into a delicious pie.

Find, O Lord, Your hidden ones, wherever they may be,

Trim out the black and rotten spots You see.

Make something beautiful out of them--and out of Me.

Amen.