We have a Victoria Plum tree in our garden and despite the drought and the apparent lack of pollinators we seem to have had a bumper crop of plums. I love to wander in the garden and eat the fruit straight from the tree. Unfortunately we seem to have a heavy infestation of plum fruit moth this year.
I have in the past used moth traps to try and control this pest, but have not bothered for the last few years.
When the first fruits ripened this year, nearly every fruit picked and bit into had a small pink caterpillar happily munching its way through the fruit, with brown dots of moth “poo” alongside the plum stone. Good old google says it is not harmful to eat these plums – plums with moth poo in? I don’t think so!
Fortunately, later ripening fruit has been more successful, (and moth free), so we now have winter supplies of plums in the deep freeze.
Are we sometimes like plums that look tasty on the outside but on the inside there is something distasteful on the inside? Or perhaps we try to put on a brave face, “yes, I’m fine,” when in fact there is something deep inside eating away at us?
Jesus came like those moth traps to remove the bad from getting inside us, but like me, we have perhaps ignored him, forgotten about him, until its too late and the “rot” has set in.
Unlike those early caterpillar infested plums, the later fruit is indeed tasty. Jesus gives us a second, and a third, and more and more chances to be the tasty fruit he wants us to be, if we believe in him.
Prayer: Jesus, you came to defeat evil, to remove the badness within us. Come into our lives we pray so that we may be the tasty fruit you believe we can be. Amen