Blackberries

Last week was the Fourth of July, and in Tennessee (and north Georgia) that means blackberry pickin’ time.  My son, John, loves blackberry cobbler, so I went out to pick some so that my wife could make John a cobbler.  Blackberries have just the right balance of sweet and tart to make them great to cook with.  That is if you add huge amounts of refined white sugar (just to poke at you health-food people).  But you must put a lot of effort into picking blackberries to get the value out of them.  And upon reflection, I learned many life lessons in the blackberry patch.  Blackberry canes have sharp stickers that point backwards into the bush.  It is easy to push your arm into the blackberry bush, but hard and sometimes painful to pull your arm out.  When I got stuck, my first inclination was to pull out quickly, but I had to stop, carefully push my arm further in, and then ease my arm out.  Blackberries are small, and it takes many to fill a small cup.  But if I was patient and kept working, I could fill up my cup.  Every once in a while, I had to eat one!  The sweet reminder kept me working.  Hey, here is what I learned:

The berries are free to all, but you must work to get them

It is much easier to get into something than to get out of something.

In life, you must take the good things with the bad

If you want to eat, you have to work.

Anything worth having comes with a risk.

You must work for anything worth having.

Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 3:13, “… every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.”  Thank you, dear Lord, for your gifts to us every day!