Bite When It's Ripe This Instant!

Bite When It’s Ripe

O loke tow oat, O loke tow oat,
O loke tow oat oat opples own bononos …

Sing it! It’s that ditty from youth camp. You simply replace the various vowels with one single vowel. Kind of fun. Kind of annoying. Totally fruity.

I never did learn the secret to picking out ripe fruit at the grocery store. (I think the song messed me up somehow.) Mom, however, knew all the tricks, down to picking something out that’s under ripe on Sunday in order that it will be perfect for the barbeque on Wednesday.

I’m sure she passed along her Ripe Fruit Secrets to me, but I can’t keep them straight… What was that about knocking on a cantaloup? Is it supposed to sound like the ocean?! Or, when you squeeze a mango, should it give to the pressure? Or should it be hard enough to break my neighbor’s window should I have to rescue her from a fire? And a pineapple’s bellybutton … should it be soft or hard? Eating it in Hawaii via room service is the only foolproof way I know to eat it right.

In any case, usually I’m just shopping in my favorite local landlocked grocery store. And if I can’t figure out how to buy exactly ripe, I prefer to buy under ripe. It’s the same as buying time. But if I take something home that’s past its prime, there’s no turning back. It’s just rotten. Good for nothing.

The dream scenario is biting into a piece of fruit in its prime. There’s nothing like it! That perfect piece of cantaloup, that smooth, juicy chunk of mango, or that dripping, slurpingly sweet hunk of pineapple.

Opportunities are much like fruit; there’s a brief window of time where they’re right. If you hold an opportunity for too long, inspecting and pondering it, it’ll pass you by and it will be too late to go back. On the other hand, if you jump on it too early, before it’s ripe, you’ve sabotaged it. You ruin its chance of ever being as good as it could have been had you patiently waited.

Is there an opportunity in your life upon which you need to act? Perhaps you need to make a decision about a relationship, a job, a childhood dream, or a financial matter. Where do you think you are in relation to its chronological scale of readiness? Do you perhaps need to continue waiting for that day of peak ripeness? Or maybe you’ve over-thought it and – sorry, but the opportunity is long gone. Or just maybe… the time for you to act is now.

Ask the Orchard Owner what He thinks. He’ll tell you. Maybe even as plainly as my mom reminded me that a cantaloup is not a conch.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1

"Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?” Luke 14:34

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil (and the fruit about to go rotten)” Ephesians 5:15-16, ESV (Jodi addition in parenthesis)