My mom and I took the kids to the apple orchard to buy some bushels of apples for canning. We got several labeled #2 bushels. A #2 bushel was half the price of a normal bushel and contained blemished apples. These apples had spots and didn’t look picture-perfect but otherwise were suitable for eating.
After getting home, I looked through the apples. One box had many good-looking ones with little wrong. When I cut them up to put in jars for canning, I cut away the bad spots, and everything was fine. Eventually, I found some with large bad spots. When I cut into them, they had gone bad from the core out and weren’t any good. I couldn’t salvage anything from them.
Then came the canning and suddenly, the POP. Not a sound I wanted to hear after removing a canner full of jars of apples from a hot burner.
I wasn’t sure what happened. Once the canner cooled, I found half of my jars had popped their lids. A big mess of cooked apples lay everywhere. Thankfully, no jars had broken, so I salvaged the mess. I threw the apples into the crockpot to finish cooking and made applesauce instead.
We all want to be or sometimes think we are like those perfect bushels of apples. But in reality, no one is perfect. We’re all sinners. We are more like those #2 bushels. One sin, one mistake, and our lives are suddenly rotting from the inside out like those bad apples I had to throw away.
But Christ can redeem our lives and our mistakes. Just like the mess of cooked apples I salvaged into applesauce, Jesus takes our messy, broken lives and makes something beautiful. Even if it isn’t quite what we want or expect, He can turn it around.
If your life has turned into a mess, give it to Jesus. Let Him turn your mess of apples into applesauce.
(Photo courtesy of pixabay and JillWellington.)
Tori Aul lives in rural Southern Illinois with her husband, two kids, and a cat. She has a background in science and has a bachelor’s degree in physics. She is involved in her church, homeschools her children, and writes children’s stories as well as using food to illustrate scientific principles or a biblical lesson.