Pumpkins

My sister-in-law just sent me an email that rang rather true. It compared Christians to pumpkins. As cheesy as it may sound, the comparison is right on. If you think about it, when we becomes believers, I mean true believers, God picks us up out of the patch where we've been growing since our birth. We've been fertilized there and sown in all kinds of weeds that have previously been used to harm us. Now, God picks us up, just as we pick pumpkins out of the patch.

When you pick a pumpkin you take it home and wash it off, just like God washes all our sin and yuckiness off. It sound incredibly cheesy, but it's so accurate. Think about the rest of the process. You cut off the top so you can get all the junk out and carve a face. A person's top is his or her brain. I think where many Christians go wrong is that when we believe and put our faith in Christ He has to chop off our human thinking. We still try to function and do things on our own and we can do nothing apart from Christ. So when we do, we exist in our humanness. Our human mind is filled with our old ways of thinking and our old plans that don't include God. We have to let God chop that off and stop thinking apart from Him. We have to stop the life and the thinking we used to have and learn a whole new way of living.

After the top comes off all the goop and seeds come out. As the email went, the seeds of guilt, doubt and I can't remember what else, but the point still remains. There's still more ugly than just removing our way of viewing life. We have to let God dig it all out and scrape us until we feel like a skeleton. We may feel bare, but it's because God's tearing away the bad to put in the light that can consume us. I know when people become believers they often feel alone in the beginning. It's because you're going through the scraping process that hurts. But think about it- if you don't get all the junk out of the pumpkin it stinks and the excess could catch on fire from the flame. God graciously makes His light bigger than our junk and allows it to consume anything we could try and smooth back on to ourselves in sin.

It's an interesting comparison when I think about it. Interesting that the ordinary things in life, the traditions and daily functions, might actually hold symbolance to a higher order and a better way of living life.