It’s October. The season of harvesting. We harvest apples, corn, pumpkins. I once heard someone compare being a Christian with that of being a pumpkin. They said that being a pumpkin is likened to being a Christian because we are, like a pumpkin, carefully lifted up from the pumpkin patch of life. We are snipped from the old life and what happens next, I believe, depends on us. We can crawl up and hide in an oven where no one will see us and we can tend to lose our witness and shrivel up and die, or we can be created into something brand new. Choose a new face, you might say. I’m not sure about you, but the second option sounds much more appealing to me than the first…
My experience with pumpkin patches is that they can tend to be prickly, much like life itself. They can be appealing but if you get too close, it stings. You tend to walk away with scratches from areas you perhaps should not have gotten so close to. What a gift when the Master Gardener reaches down and saves us! It is then that the transformation begins. The cleaning, the gutting, the washing. I am sure some wish they had remained there on the ground. Some wiggle down and actually do roll back over there and stay until they eventually die.
But, if we allow God to do his miraculous work within us, He begins by opening us up. That is often a very vulnerable and frightening place for many of us to be, especially if we come from places where we tend to hide from the rest of the world. After we have been “exposed”, He reaches in and begins to get rid of the “junk” inside. He scrapes and he pulls. It can be quite painful at times, to say the least. The more we resist, the longer it takes, the more it hurts. But then there finally comes a time when we are made clean - made clean by the righteousness of Christ. One day we are sitting in the dirt, basking in the warm sun without a care in the world, and the next day we are being opened up and cleaned out. Cleansed from rubbish in our lives that so easily gets a hold and before we know it, it’s attached itself to our life in such a way so that it actually is very painful to remove.
Sin does that. It looks appealing and it always sounds fun. Takes root and creates quite a mess. But if we let God have His way and love us as only He can, He gives us a brand new look. He cleans us out and puts a light inside for all to see. A light that shines brightly in the darkness through a smile filled with joy.
I have pondered over the pumpkin patch. I have thought how wonderful it is to have been cleaned out by holy hands for a holy purpose by a holy God. It gives me shivers. Who would have thought we could have taken an ordinary pumpkin and seen the very hand of God upon it in such a way? How magnificent the comparison of an ordinary pumpkin with that of the life of a brand new Christian.
A brand new face, eyes that see like His, a mouth that smiles with joy, the light of his Spirit shining through us into a dark world ... Doesn’t it make you just want to be a pumpkin?!
October 12, 2005
