Free Fruit - a good news story

With the amazing summer we had this year, the wild fruit crops have been great. When up north, I ate wild raspberries and cherries. On returning home, Spot and I spent a few hours picking brambles and elder berries to make wine.

I don't think I can recall a year where there's been so much fruit. And apples - 12.5 kilos from a tree in the middle of the Echline roundabout and another few kilos a couple of weeks ago on a roadside tree just outside Culross. In the case of the apples, we've made 1 gallon of wine, ate a few and prepared and frozen LOADS as stewed apples. All free. All there, on the trees or bushes, waiting to be picked.

And I see this waste. Wonder why passers by don't take some of this abundance (okay, in the case of the tree in the Echline roundabout, it may not be most people's idea of fun to cross into the centre of a busy roundabout and lowp the crash barrier, but there are loads in more sensibly accessible places). Have we, in a generation, lost the sense of where food comes from - that if it's not wrapped in plastic on a supermarket shelf there must be something wrong with it. Or do people look and see and wonder, but don't know if they can take the fruit and, even if they did take the fruit, what on earth they would do with it.

And as I study for my next exam on the Historical Jesus, especially in this season of Advent, of preparation, I think (though this is a bit of a distraction). I think and I wonder about that gift God sent into the world - his son Jesus Christ. Sent to be God with us - Emmanuel. Sent to show God's love for the world. A love which is there, ripe for the picking.

But people may see it and not know what to do with it, or how to discover more, or not really understand how simple and easy it would be just to accept it. Maybe the church has made God's love shown, like the apples on the trees I've seen, but not let people know they can have some too. Better than that, God loves them already. They don't need the church or ministers or (should I say this) the bible to receive God's love. Yes, they all help understand God, develop a relationship with him, grow to love him back, but are they really necessary to accept God's love? I don't think so, but I do think the church needs to be a bit like a sign post and recipe book.  Point to the free fruit of God's love - saying please help yourself - and offer ways to understand and use that love in their lives.