the other night i noticed that i had a picture in my mind of an apple that had a sticker on it. you dont see them all that often anymore, but i do remember a time when each individual fruit had a sticker on it with the brand of apple, or where it come from. bananas did it a lot too.
anyway, this thought came to mind, to liken our world to an apple, with it's sticker removed.
if you were as dumb as i was when i was a kid, you also would've taken a bite out of an apple with the sticker still attached and feel the taste of plastic in your mouth, or choke on it, as i sometimes did! after the experience, you wouldn't reckon lightly with eating an apple with the sticker on again.
well, I think of the world like an apple without the sticker, and that the removal of the sticker represents the idea of people rejecting that the world had an owner, that the world came from somewhere and was planted by someone. instead, the world is just an apple and that's all there is to it, and its apparently our right to eat from it as much as we like. the idea of a sticker being on an apple is bitter to the taste of those who wish to eat, and eat only, from the world.
truth is, the sticker tells us what the apple is. imagine the sticker told us not just its company name, but also a notice to beware of the pips. if it is removed, someone somewhere may be eating an apple for the first time, and is just going to eat and eat until they reach the pips and they won't think "oh, i was warned about this", instead they will just go ahead and eat the pips. the pips of an apple contain cyanide, so it's not usually a good idea to eat them.. but if we didnt know about a sticker, then we will just get sick. sick of the apple. sick of eating.
its worth the discomfort (to our own pride) of the presence of the sticker so that we may not encounter blindly with a real harm.
and note, the sticker isnt an affront to eating the apple, but if we just let anything into our mouths then we have a problem. just so, if we let any old thing into our hearts, or if we allow ourselves to accept the unacceptable.
i dont use this as a proof to the existence of god. there is no proof, only persuasion. i just use this to make picture language sense of my beliefs regarding god, and our tendency as human beings to want to do whatever the hell we like, at, ultimately, our own expense and our own ruin.
when i was young, my sister Susanna used to collect all her apple stickers. whenever she ate an apple, she stuck the sticker on the side of a cupboard. it was in its own special way, a pretty sight :) I can't help but smile and chuckle to think of her devotion to such things.. and it reminds me of the purposeful, rightful reverence we can have of god's ownership of the world. his ways are sweeter than the world's. he doesn't say 'don't taste' - he directs our enjoyment, that we may have the best of life, life to the full.
