Food's Timing

I was thinking the other day about the time it takes for food to be grown, harvested, prepared, and eaten.

The last part, the eating, is very quick and seemingly effortless compared to the extensive time and labor for natural things to become food.

Looking at a single apple, if grown from a seed, takes many years for it to become an apple.

An apple tree takes about seven years of growth before fruit may sprout from its branches.

Yet it takes maybe only a minute or two for an apple to be devoured.

Comparing lifecycles, an apple tree may live for 80 years... yet it may lose its ability to bare fruit after about 50 years.

I am fascinated by the measure of time, the usefulness and necessity of natural things, and mankind's relation to nature.

We can compare our relationship to food, and in this case an apple tree.

We can also explore how we are very similar to nature in certain ways.

Taken well care of, an apple tree may be very fruitful throughout its life and can be utilized in a great way.

Its fruit can be eaten as plain apples, or made into pies and an assortment of other foods.

Its leaves can be used as fertilizer (food) for other plants and trees.

When pruning the tree, its branches can also be utilized.

At the end of its life, perhaps its wood can be made into furniture or applied to some other use outlasting its typical lifecycle.

Throughout a 50 year cycle, an apple tree may have given further life to hundreds of other apple trees through its seed-bearing fruit.

When thinking about such things and what we've been taught from Above, how very much we are like the living world around us... even an apple tree.

Like a tree, a fruit and its usefulness, are we... or we should be.

The parables of God feed us in such ways that the learning of life and what it means to actually live go beyond the mundane or the typical (if anyone dared to call life mundane or typical, but perhaps some people do due to their unfruitfulness).

Much like the work that goes into seeding, cultivating, watering, nurturing and eventually harvesting an apple tree is the work that goes into each one of us (and those around us).

And just as one reaps what they sow, so also does the laborer reap their share of what they sowed in either an actual tree... or in themselves and others.

God spoke to mankind in ways man was able to understand, yet only those with open hearts can fully appreciate and 'hear' His message.

Those who do not hear are like trees that fail to bear fruit, although they grow mighty and strong looking.

God spoke to mankind through nature's rhythms because man is not separate from the natural world while in the body, but exists through it.

The earth and what it has to offer, naturally speaking, has so much to teach us, to give us, to help us, if only man can look beyond himself and his ideas long enough to learn from God and the nature He has created for us.

To learn from God's thoughts and what He has set in motion, to add to this, is when man is able to not only appreciate what God has created, but also appreciate the lifecycle God has gifted man.

It is through this manner that a man is able to live in balance with the natural world God has created him in... to live, if for a single lifecycle... to bear fruit... and leave a fruitful legacy.