Dale Ridge church of Christ

One of my favorite treats I enjoyed in my childhood was my grandmother’s blackberry jelly. To this day, I have experienced none other like it, and I promise you I have taste tested every store bought version of blackberry jelly that I have ever found. It had the perfect combination of tartness that caused your jaw muscles to contract and intense sweetness that would rescue those muscles just before they became too uncomfortable. Imagine my surprise later in life that the quest for that seasonal treat would contribute one of the building blocks of my adulthood.

    During the summer that I would have been a rising 6^th grader, I had noticed that the blackberries were coming in very nicely. This should be a good year for all of the fruit and berry deserts, but Oh! Especially the jelly! I waited and waited for the jelly but it never came – so I finally asked grandma when we were going to have blackberry jelly this year. The berries were going to dry up! She just said, “Go down to the bushes and fill this pan.”

As she bent under the sink, the sound of that familiar pan clanging under there was all that I could hear. I was frozen in terror. When this particular pan came out, someone was going to have to spend some time in the garden picking something. We learned to run when we heard that sound! Now this pan held 40 or 50 gallons (At least in the mind of a 6th grader it did) and it would take hours of hard labor in the sun to fill.

There it was in front of me. I had no option but to take it and walk out to face my self-inflicted chore.

I had been out there hours (At least in the mind of a 6th grader I had) and the bottom of my pan was barely covered. The berries had been out too long so the birds had pecked the seeds out of the biggest, juiciest ones. The briars that they grow on seem to scratch me no matter what I tried to avoid it. My hands were sticky from broken berries and burning from the scratches.

Could it be?? It my grandmother coming out to rescue me! This ordeal was just about over.

I can remember her soft laugh as she looked at me from under the pith hat that she wore to do her gardening. It was a laugh that always meant “here, let me show you how.”

In a matter of minutes, the pan was full enough for grandma and she invited me back up to have something to drink. On the walk up I asked her how long I had been out there and she thought no more than a half an hour.

I followed up with the question that became part of the fabric of my life. “Why does it have to be so hard to get the blackberries?” With that same soft laugh she replied, “So you’ll remember to be thankful for what you have.”

I’m fairly sure that I didn’t have a lot of use for that answer as a sixth grader, but later in life it sure did help me understand what James was trying to say in James 1:2-4 or Paul in Romans 5:3-5 where they suggest that we should be glad to be challenged.

I’m also sure that grandma would have been proud to know that time we had together was the first thing I thought of when I was taught that we weren’t promised an easy life as Christians, but the rewards are going to be grander than our imagination can create.

I am sure too, that the jelly was the best ever that year.

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Filed under: Butch Adams, Devotional on July 15th, 2008