Life is a bowl full of cherries!

     Whoever said tat life is a bowl full of cherries hadn't the experience of tossing one in your mouth that was either sour or going bad.  I know that the analogy is lame but it works.  Sitting here reading and writing I had a bowl of cherries (they are gone now...except the bad one) that I was eating from.  Engrossed in my reading and writing I wasn't looking at the cherries that I was popping in my mouth.  Sure enough, when I bit down my mouth was filled with this awful taste!  Yep, a rotting one amongst the batch.  After spitting it out and rinsing my mouth I resumed my same activities.  No more rotten cherries as I looked at each one as I put them in my mouth.  Life is like that.  We think innocently and over time experience and knowledge take away the innocence of life.  Expecting cherries we now accept that there may be bad cherries or sour cherries from time to time.  We just need to look, watch and not trust that all the bad cherries have been removed from the bag packaged for us. 
     Life tosses us more good cherries than it does bad or sour cherries.  Sometimes it seems that I focus unduly on the bad or sour instead of the good.  When this becomes a habit I tend to get cynical about other areas of life as well.  The main problem with circumstances or cherries is the unknown nature of each until you experience them.  Circumstances aren't always what they seem to be and neither do cherries.  When suffering a loss it's difficult for me and others to come to grips with any kind of loving message from God to us or others.  I especially have problems when these bad or sour cherries happen to children.  Trying to see good with a child being wheeled into surgery is difficult.  Their little body on the adult sized stretcher is an image burned into my memory.  What I didn't know was God was using this circumstance to build empathy in me toward others.  That would come later.  Losing a baby was very difficult.  Understanding the sanctity of life from that experience took me to an entirely new level of how I value all life.  I'm no saying I look for bad or sour cherries to have the experience.  No one should.  What I am saying is that we all need to have our bad and sour cherry moments in order to appreciate what God is doing either in our lives or the lives of others
     You will noticed that my experience listed above was coached in the "engrossed" statement.  It's when we are so focused on the big picture that we are then left with the little picture that slams into our reality.  Bad cherries are picked or delivered too late while sour cherries are delivered too early.  Herein lies the problem.  Timing.  There is a plan and it is being worked out with or without me.  There is a choice I can make daily.  I can look at the bowl of cherries and see if there are any that are bad.  Once discovered I can rid the bowl of bad cherries.  I can also use the same process to remove the sour cherries.  Once both are removed from the bowl of cherries I can eat without looking with no fears of biting into a bad or sour cherry.  As I go about my business I can have easy travelling with no bad cherries laying there as speed bumps. 
     We don't have to be alone in life and watching this life lesson addressed. There is an old saying stating: "Four eyes are better than one."  When I allow God and my fellow Christian (trusted) to look into my life I also give them permission to examine what is inside of me.  There they can identify the bad cherries as well as the sour ones.  They can be addressed and in the future quite possibly be avoided totally.  Life is always about the bowl full of cherries no matter whether you change or not.  No change in us indicates we don't mind eating rotten fruit.  Next time you find yourself eating a bowl full of cherries remember that they are in your hands.