Good morning…
After our Friday morning discussion of Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor, I looked down and saw the strange sight above. A cut out, curled up magazine page caught randomly in the corner of our patio where the fourteen of us had just finished class. From where did this image blow in? Pictured was a fork. A piece of rocky-road brownie. A thick wave of peanut butter touched by a single strawberry.
Coincidentally, just moments before, one friend had mentioned the word strawberry in our group. “Sue, I’m leaving you an article about nocturnal farming,” she said before leaving our home. “Experts say that strawberries which are harvested in the dark of night have a sweeter, more robust flavor.”
After everyone left I found this odd image, then uncovered some fun facts from the article entitled Extreme Heat Forcing U.S. Farmers To Go Nocturnal by Eli Tan and Jacob Bogage printed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday, September 17, 2023.
- Farmers can “taste the difference” in crops picked at night versus during the day. Produce picked at night probably has more water content than produce picked during the day, which is especially important for fruits such as grapes, blueberries and strawberries.
- Perhaps more important, plants, like humans, have a circadian clock that can tell the difference between night and day. That can cause them to taste different based on the hour they’re picked.
- In the darkness of night, plants convert sugars into antioxidants, vitamins and other metabolites – things that can affect a crop’s taste, texture and nutritional value.
Fascinating, right? As a way to remember the value of harvesting the treasures of darkness, I created a wordless prayer card from the strawberry image.
In the middle of creating this prayer card, I got the exciting phone call from my longtime friend Brooke LeBow. A new heart had suddenly become available for her husband at the Vanderbilt Heart Center. James had been waiting for over five years for a desperately needed heart transplant. Brooke had just been in our class two hours earlier and now they were packing up and heading to Nashville, Tennessee. I blogged about their whirlwind experience in the middle of that night, A New Heart For James LeBow.
After texting through the next day into the next night, Brooke and I exchanged messages at 1:20 am after the surgeon visited her post-surgery. “James is doing well & heart is doing great,” she wrote. “They were very pleased. I won’t be able to see him for about three hours, but the kids and I are elated, relieved, thrilled and so thankful for God’s blessings and the incredible amount of love, support and prayers.”
“Wow, Brooke,” I replied. “What an incredible experience. How privileged I feel to be with you in Spirit during these amazing moments. Prayers of love are lifted as you wait to see James face to face. I love that the surgery took place at night, much like the nocturnal farming article. Sewn in during the rich darkness of night, may this new heart be like the sweetest of all strawberries.”
The revelation of God is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of God are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of God are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of God are plain and easy on the eyes. God’s reputation is twenty-four-carat gold, with a lifetime guarantee. The decisions of God are accurate down to the nth degree.
God’s Word is better than a diamond, better than a diamond set between emeralds. You’ll like it better than strawberries in spring, better than red, ripe strawberries (Psalm 19:7-10, MSG).
May we savor the revelation of God as a signpost, a life-map, a lifetime guarantee which is sweeter than any strawberry picked in the dark of night.
…Sue…
