About a month ago, Tony and I went peach picking. We drove to a local farm, and bought a box big enough to fit a whole half a bushel of peaches. Then, we trudged through the wet and muddy orchard to where they were picking that day. 

It had rained hard the night before. Every time we’d reach up and pick a peach, all the trees’ leaves would shower water down our arms and onto our heads. But we weren’t deterred, and we came away with close to seventy beautiful peaches. 

What did we do with all of them, you ask? 

After making baking a few hot bubbly peach crisps—the rest of it, we froze. So all year, we will have the sweet goodness of Pennsylvania peaches in our smoothies or the occasional treat. But as you can imagine, the freezing process was a lot more tedious than the picking. 

When we brought home all of our peaches, we carefully loaded them into brown paper bags. Then two days later, I pulled all of them out to know which ones had ripened, and which needed more time. Those that were ripe, I began to freeze. Those that were still hard, I put back into bags. But then, there were the ones, I wish I hadn’t found.

Reaching into the brown paper bags, a few times I felt something soft and squishy. Too soft, and too squishy. When I pulled it out into the light, I could see mold covering at least one whole side of the peach. As I went through each bag, a small pile of almost rotten peaches began to form. 

I had caught them before they began to smell.

But I didn’t know if I had caught them before the whole of each peach was ruined. When I finished accessing the rest of the peaches and put them in their proper place, I pulled out my cutting board. I grabbed a pairing knife, and began to cut away all the moldy and bruised spots. Sometimes, there was at least a half of good peach left. Others, it was not even worth it. 

The peach was completely rotten. 

As I continued cutting away decomposing peach flesh though, I remembered something. At the beginning of my sorting process that day, the first few peaches I pulled out of a bag, were hard. They needed to be put back in the bag. And I had had a fleeting thought like “I don’t need to do this today. None of the peaches are probably ripe yet.” 

It was a busy day, and I had a lot to do, so I was tempted to stop there. But experience told me otherwise. It told me it was better to be safe than sorry. If I had stopped, and put away the peaches for even one more day, the moldy ones would have spoiled all those around them. All of our time in the orchard, trying to pick all those peaches wouldn’t have mattered. And instead of losing about four peaches, it would have been much more. 

Today is the first Monday of September. In all the busyness of this new season, you and I could be tempted to skip over our bag of peaches. To put off looking at our schedules, relationships, or commitments, believing there are no bad fruit in our lives. To carry on, business as usual. To wait until January to reflect on how we’re actually living. Only, if we do that, there may be more rotten fruit by then, than we’d like to own. 

For September on the blog, we are stepping back. In each Monday and Thursday post, we’ll be looking at an area of our lives that could use some reflection—maybe even some inspection—to make sure we’re on the right path. Some weeks we’ll focus on an important perspective to help us deal with what is hard right now. And others, we’ll talk about how to get in a healthier groove. 

Let’s make sure the fruit we’re stewarding, holding, and even offering is good. 

When was the last time you took stock of your schedule, relationships, and commitments?

How do you need to step back this month and look at the big picture of your life?

 

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