Peaches

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Luke 12:27)

I live in Georgia, and I also live two miles from a Kroger, so you'd think it would be easy for me to find some peaches to photograph. But since peach season isn't quite here yet, and a trip to the grocery store is a luxury during a pandemic, I knew I wasn't going to find a nice bowl of fresh peaches today.

So I went to my photo album from the past five years (a.k.a. my phone) to see if I could find anything. I found a nice picture of a peach-colored lily, which I thought would go great with the verse about the lilies from Luke 12 ... but I didn't want to post a peach-colored lily! The word for the day was peaches, and by golly, I wanted peaches!

Since I've made enough pies and cobblers over the years, I thought, surely I would find some photos of my peach desserts somewhere.

Nope.

Next step was to text my neighbors. Does anyone have any peaches? No, I don't need any myself. I just need a picture. That's right. Oh, and sorry to text everyone at 7:00 a.m. Didn't realize what time it was.

Of course no one had peaches. They're all in the same boat I am.

But then one of my neighbors texted me: Would a jar of peaches work?

Oh! A jar! Of peaches! I'd totally forgotten that peaches can be something other than fresh and raw, or baked into something tasty. I checked my own pantry for some canned peaches, and when I found none, I told my neighbor that she was a Great American Hero and asked her to text me a snapshot.

So then, instead of writing about peaches today, I thought I might write about how good it is to have good neighbors. Maybe quote part of Proverbs 27:10: "... better a neighbor nearby than a relative far away." (My far-away relatives, by the way, had no peach pictures. I asked.)

But then I started thinking about the fact that I'd totally forgotten that peaches can come in jars, or cans. Or jellies or yogurts. Heck, people make their own peach preserves. My one-track (or two-track) mind could only focus on fresh peaches, in all their sweet-smelling glory, or peaches baked into a dessert. Because those are pretty much the only two ways I consume peaches.

You see where I'm going with this, right? Sometimes we think we need that one thing that we don't have, when really, what we need might be right there in front of our face (or in the pantry of the next-door neighbor).

It would be trite to say that God made sure I had something for this blog post. But I do think my little peach drama mirrors a greater truth, if you think about it. This morning, I wanted a lovely photo of fresh, fuzzy peaches, preferably in a nice bowl in front of the window, with the morning light coming in. If not that, I wanted to share a photo of one of my lovely baked desserts. A friend was able to help me see that my vision of what I thought I needed was very narrow indeed, and that all I really needed was a jar. Or a photo of a jar. And that was it. That's all I needed.

My neighbor's sliced peaches

And that brings us back to the lilies (peach or otherwise) that we should consider. How often we get caught up in our narrow visions of how everything should be, what we have to have, how things should look and behave--when, with a little widening of the vision, we see that God gives us what we need all along.