Picking Fruit

A few weeks ago, whilst walking painfully back from my weekly parkrun, I picked some blackberries, put a couple of saucers in the freezer, and made some jam. 

I only needed one saucer. 

The following weekend I picked a couple more blackberries, made a cake, and topped it with blackberries and carefully put had jam inside. I'm reliably informed by my colleagues that the cake was edible, but I'm trying to be modest so won't be showing any of the endorsements my foray into baked goods recieved. I won't be entering any competitions, though.

Don't worry, this isn't a lifestyle blog. 

A month or so ago the blackberries were virtually falling off the brambles - easy to pick and so I came home with a kilo or so, easily. The last time I picked them, on the cusp of my cake-making, there were only a few left - the sweetest few - but they were delicious. They were also more hidden, harder to reach. But without them my cake would have been a sponge with jam, it wouldn't have *quite* been complete. 

This still isn't a post about  my new lifestyle. 

This is actually a post about mission and evangelism. 

Jesus once said 'the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few'. That, of course, still stands. There is such a great harvest, a gathering of fruit, that the work of mission and evangelism is vital and ongoing. We need more workers, in my opinion, both those committed full time in a paid sense to do the work of the Gospel, and the rest of us committed full time as slaves dedicated to the building and proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

But what if it was the other way around? What if the harvest was few and the workers plentiful?

What if you had big teams, lavish launches, beautiful resources, superb cakes - and only a few people turned up?

What if the harvest was small?

I think Jesus spoke about that too. 

It is easy to pick low hanging fruit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't - because just as every blackberry from my first batch became an integral part of the jam, so too does every adopted son and daughter matter to God, every toe and hair that makes up the body of Christ, his Church. It's easy to celebrate massive 'revivals', huge numbers, radical stories and new people coming in big numbers. 

It's harder to wait and reach deeper and pick the past few blackberries. 

To show up regularly, even when there isn't any fruit to pick.

While I believe Jesus had even this blog post in mind when he spoke scripture 2000 years ago (I'm not saying this is a particularly good blog post, rather that God excercises what theologian Bruce Ware calls 'meticulous sovereignty', and this can be summed up in the notion that God is Good), what Jesus said about this doesn't use a fruity analogy. Rather, it's about sheep. 

One sheep. 

The last sheep. 

The lost sheep.

You can find this story in Luke 15:3-7, nestled amongst several other beautiful parables, but I reproduce it here:

Then Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn't he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, 'rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent."

Maybe the sweetest sheep? The one that meant the most because it was as needed and valuable and desired and beautiful as the 99 the shepherd already had? The shepherd already had the 99 - they were righteous. And thus the effort expended in the pursuit and embrace of that lost sheep is immensely important. Worth rejoicing over.

This isn't a blog post about blackberries and cake. This blog isn't becoming a Pinterest in words. 

This post was provoked by blackberry picking - but I hope it might help to motivate those of us involved in mission and evangelism to keep picking the low hanging abundant fruit - because making jam is great - but also to keep going, to gather in the last few, the difficult few.

Who knows, they could be the sweetest. 

And after the end of autumn, when there are no blackberries left to pick, comes Advent. 

And that, as they say, is a whole other story. 

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