"Are you hanging on until you’re ripe?"

When I lived on the coast of North Carolina, just across the road from us was a field of about a hundred acres of strawberry plants. The owners ran an international plant shipping business and harvested berries to sell.

Migrant workers began picking in early April each year. Most if not all of the strawberries they harvested weren’t ripe, mostly red on the outside, but not through the middle. They didn’t spoil like this on the way to the store.

Well, around the end of April or the first of May, the migrant workers stopped picking. There were no longer enough slightly ripened berries in the field. And then the owners called us, telling us we could glean in the fields whatever we wanted.

So we would pick until our backs hurt. And these berries were better than any you can buy because they had stayed on the plant until they were fully ripe, through and through.Are you the same through and through?

Are you on the vine with God long enough to ripen? Hang onto God as you make a life, not just a living.