I have a friend who has never tasted a strawberry. She's allergic. Tragic!! If that were me, once a year I'd consider getting the ripest, sweetest strawberries I could find, savoring the eating experience, and quickly washing them down with a Benadril Shake. Or maybe a strawberry Benadril shake? Hopefully they would cancel each other. Perhaps the emergency room lounge would be a prudent place to enjoy such a treat?
Last year we went strawberry picking. What stood out to me most from the experience, right after the strangeness of paying someone to watch you work, was the contrast between the ripe, small field berries we picked and the giant, lustrous store-bought ones. In fact, other than being the same berries, grocery store berries and the ones you might find in a field have little in common.
The ones we get in the store now absolutely astound us. They're the size of plums! Some aberrations are bigger. They're red red red. They're beautiful! You feel like they've selected this tiny percentage of berries - elite grade monster berries! All the supermodels of the berry world, right there for me. Look at those sexy berries!
But it's a trick, a ploy. Sure, they're big and colored like a peak-of-ripeness strawberry... but they're not. Below the veneer of red they're white and hard. And frankly, they don't have much taste. I haven't looked this up, but I'm sure that this has all been engineered. It's marketing. Surely these berries are bred and hybridized...engineered perhaps, with the goal to make them red, big, and hard. Of size and color to attract the consumer, a 6 on the Mohs scale for safe transport.
But I can't really blame the producers. It's a market economy and they strive to give us what we want - or at least what's attractive to us. The problem is that, even though I know better, I'm addicted to appearances.
Eyes closed, a red-ripe field berry blows away an engineered one. No contest. The real experience of strawberries is their taste and bouquet. There's a visual element, sure, but that's not the most important quality. But there's something about me that causes my visual perceptions to override the others. Why is that?
It's endemic though. In fact, most of my life I aim for appearances rather than more essential qualities. I want to look like my life is together, thoughtful, controlled and ordered. (It's SO not) I'm overly aware of how others might perceive me, and I craft my responses and image to illicit a favorable reaction from others. I protect myself from being hurt, reduce my relational bruising. I'm the super-market berry. Nice exterior, but hard and flavorless.
The most satisfying and freeing relationships I have are the ones where people really know me to the core. My issues, my faults, my unattractiveness; the real me, my internal world. They see my junk within and love me anyhow. I don't appear so attractive and grand, and I can be bruised easily. But those are the sweetest relationships - and I don't have many. They're not just casually packaged and picked up. They're cultivated, with great care, and they're work. But oh, the richness, flavor and satisfaction they can produce.
And, if that's true, consider for a moment that a relationship with God could be the pinnacle of satisfaction - where you can be most truly known, most deeply accepted, and most free to drop the tiresome engineering of personal appeal and be loved where you're at right now. That's dangerously sweet. Do you know him like that?
Next time you're in the produce section, let those big, attractive rock-berries remind you to take an introspective moment about your potentially sweetest relationships.
And go farther in to find the truly good ones.
