TODAY THE WORD is RAISINS. Okay, I can feel the heads shaking and thinking, “What, raisins?” The funny thing is I am doing the same, why raisins? Greg was eating some raisin cinnamon toast this morning and this became the inspiration for today. As a child, I ate a lot of raisins. This was probably due to them being sweet and available. I loved anything which had raisins or I would eat a handful taken from the box. I loved grapes too, but for some reason I always thought of raisins and grapes being two different foods. I know that sounds silly, but I did. We would go in the country and visit our relatives who had grape vines and eat to our hearts content. I felt it a treat and would look forward to picking them and loving each and every one I ate. It was a seasonal thing and then the grapes would be gone until the next season. What I find amusing, I was sad when the grapes were gone and we would wait for them (we didn’t buy grapes in the grocery store like we do now) but Momma would buy raisins. I had the grapes all the year long but I never thought of it in this way. If you look at a grape and then a raisin, you can see the origin. It is however, the outward appearance that takes that similarity away and that is how I came to the deeper thought……Let’s think of ourselves as grapes. We are born on the family vine and we are little fruit. We are nourished by the sun and the nutrients and the rain and we flourish and grow. We become beautiful grapes (all of us are beautiful in our own way by the grace of God) and we are picked off the vine. If we are chosen to live a longer life, we become older and start to age and change into the raisin time of our lives. We look differently, but similarly. One can look at us and see the younger, more vibrant grape that lived on the vine. The longer we live the more wrinkled we become and sometimes, we become almost brittle and require some soaking (care giving) to stay plump (healthy). The important fact is we become even sweeter than when we were young and sweet. Have you thought of how richly sweet the same grape has become when the grape becomes a raisin (older)? What I derive from this metamorphosis is God knows how to make us sweeter if we allow Him into our hearts. God’s plan, no matter if it is us as humans or grapes on the vine, works in a magnificent way of using the same body but enhancing its inner worth. Raisins? We are God’s grapes in the process of becoming rich raisins and to be forever in His Vineyards.
DAILY FEATURED BIBLE VERSE:
1 Corinthians 6:19
(c) copyright 2013 Arline Lott Miller. The material here copyrighted, use only by permission.
