Past Their Prime

For over a dozen years, I have come to this orchard each fall to gather apples. On this particular day near the autumnal equinox, the temperature is in the neighborhood of eighty degrees. The leaves are still green, mostly. A varied breeze stirs pleasant air. The sun shines brightly. The few clouds in the sky are high and white and thin.

I pull my truck up the driveway toward an old stone house then turn east into the orchard. I park in the shade. While I’m waiting for my friend Greg, I walk around and check things out a bit.

Branches of most of the trees bend heavily toward the earth with the burden of harvest. A few trees have already shed all of their apples. Several others still hold ripening fruit. The ground beneath the trees is litterly, uhmm, I mean “literally” covered with apples. Big apples, juicy apples, red apples, bruised apples, rotted apples. Hey, wait a minute! What’s up with this?!

In most years, very few of the apples on the ground would be this far gone this soon. Bruised, of course, but not ruined. For cider making, bruises are not a problem. Rot, though, is another matter. As is mold.

Greg pulls in and I greet him with a couple of five-gallon plastic buckets. We get to our work.

Normally, I’d cull out about half of the groundfall apples. Admittedly, my standards are pretty low when it comes to potential contributors to fresh, sweet, apple juice. Low but not non-existent. This year, even with my wide parameters of acceptance, only one in a dozen or so make the grade. It’s a bit disheartening to realize we should have come at least two weeks earlier. It takes Greg and me more than twice as long to fill our buckets as it normally would.

But we do still fill our buckets. There are so many apples on the ground that even though it takes longer for the good ones to be found, there are plenty of them around. Something about this reminds me of Jesus’s observations several centuries ago, “The fields are white unto harvest,” and “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

With a bit of chagrin, I think that the white of this particular harvest seems rather tinged with brown and the harvesting would certainly go quicker with more hands. I wish Mark and Neil could be here to help… But it is a beautiful day in the orchard, Greg is mighty good company, and making good cider is certainly worth the time and effort of gathering the apples.

Surely, the harvest of souls and the redeeming nourishment of lives is also worthy of our slow labors and prayerful efforts. Even for those that might seem too far gone…