Life is a journey, thus the name on my blog - PONDERINGS OF A JOURNEY. I am not sure about you but I often find that my relationship with my Heavenly Father has many object lessons tided into the life I am living and the activities I am doing. For example to earn some extra money for my "apartment" fund I have been getting up at 5:30 am to pick strawberries. Look at those yummy, delicious, mouth watering strawberries. Don't they look soooooooooo good. They do now but those are the final product. Those are the strawberries you buy in the store. If you are a strawberry picker you know that not all strawberries look and taste as good as the ones in the picture. If you are the one picking the strawberries you have to come to the fields early in the morning prepared to get dirty. Picking strawberries is a dirty job. You have to kneel, or sit on the ground which first thing in the morning is muddy and wet from the morning dew. As a picker you have to carefully, but efficiently go through your row to make sure you get all the strawberries that are rip and sellable for that day. You cannot take just any old strawberry that looks okay. You have to check for soft spots, and you have to check for mold, and monkey faces (those are the strawberries that are odd shaped). So to get the nice plump juicy strawberries that you get in the stores some one has got to be willing to get dirty, and get a little sore. Did I mention that strawberry picking is very hard on your body. Man, alive am I ever sore these days.

So you may be asking what does strawberry picking have to do with my spiritual life, and my relationship with Jesus. Well if I want a relationship with Jesus that is good. The kind of relationship that goes deep and is transparent and authentic then I need to be willing to get dirty, to get down into the dirt and sort through what is good and what is bad. What is from God and what is not from God. And sometimes I am going to be really tired and really sore, and my body will ache or my heart will hurt, but that in the end will be the tools and the instruments that God use to deepen my relationship with Him. I cannot jump to the end product without the work. I cannot buy my relationship with Jesus. No more than I could buy a husband (okay I know that in some countries you can do this and even in North America you can too, but I hope you get my point. We cannot just by the end product that steals away from the sweetness of the journey. Just like I will never be able to bit into a strawberry again with savoring the flavor and know the work that went into picking that little wonderful explosions of mouth joy!!!!!