When You Feel Like You've Been Through the Mill

This morning as I dragged myself to the kitchen after a week of chemo and other cancer treatments, the thought went through my mind, "I feel like I've been through the mill."

A few days ago, Crystal and I discovered that Queen Creek Olive Mill wasn't very far from my clinic, and we decided to go after treatments one day to take the little tour. 

 I was barely functioning, but it was a non-chemo day, and I was fascinated with the story of an entrepreneurial family moving to Arizona, which had perfect climate for raising olive trees. Some years ago, maybe twenty, they decided to start growing olives

Here are a few of the trees.

And here, just as you head in toward the gift shop and venue, is a basil and herb garden.  I stood there breathing deeply of the wonderful aroma of the fresh basil--an herb they use for some of their own edible creations in the shop.

The tour started outside for ten minutes in the heat (but thankfully in the shade of tall olive trees), where we learned that a press similar to the replica above was what was used in the long ago past to press olives. 

And after the olives, seeds and all, had been thoroughly mashed between those stones, the mash would be pressed through woven mats in a machine similar to this replica. 

 From that machine, the oil would be transferred to great vats similar to the replicas in the distance.

Replicas of olden vats for olive oil. 

Nowadays, huge machines are used.  

We were taken into a processing room where olives are processed when in season. This huge machine above does the mashing.

And this one does the pressing/spinning which finishes getting the oil out of the olive pulp.  

We were treated to a 3-minute video that told the brief story of how olives are picked and processed.  

I snapped a picture of this monster machine that literally drives  over the olive trees in the grove, shakes the branches with special "fingers," and harvests the olives.

Olives pouring into a huge container 

Olives on a conveyor belt. (on the video screen, of course) 

 Crystal and I, while waiting for the tour, had enjoyed roaming slowly through the enormous gift shop with all its tempting delicacies--coffees, creamers, pastries, cold specialty drinks such as prickly pear cactus lemonade, various sauces, olive oils, jars of olives, numerous Italian pastas, and other desert specialty items.

We looked, but like good children who have been told by mama to look and not touch, we looked but we did not buy anything! The oils were about twice as expensive as in the store. But I did almost purchase a package of bow-tie, non-gluten, naturally multi-colored pasta for Sam's new girlfriend who cannot eat gluten. I wanted so much to buy that, but do you spend $11 for something not much different than you can get from a regular store for about $6?

And I wanted to buy an olive wood Christmas bell--till I looked at the price. This ornament was also unique. 

But the prices! Whew!

So if you go for this tour, prepare for a good time but hang tight to your wallet!

I thought about the olives innocently growing on all those trees, just living their peaceful, uninterrupted lives

until a monster comes along, ripping them from their stems and roots, dumping them into huge wagons and disposing of them in a highly impersonal machine that mashes each one, seed heart and all, in with all the other ones in one great big mashy, mushy mess!

And from there, the whole mashed pulp gets sent through a pipe to another machine that squeezes and presses and spins--otherwise extracting oil. 

Oil!

Ah! The whole purpose of the picking, the dumping, the mashing, the pressing, the spinning, and the painful extracting till nothing is left of the original olive except beautiful, delicious, aromatic, healthful, tender, smooth oil--minus all the pulp and mash and anything distateful.

When we feel like we have been through the mill, maybe we have.

Maybe God is putting us through the olive mill of His divine purpose until nothing is left except what is useful, beautiful, tender, smooth, healthful, and delicious!