I eat simply most nights at supper, usually just a George Foreman grilled chicken breast and a bowl of salad or black beans followed by yogurt. Thursday after school, while shopping for my next week's food, I decided to pick up a tomato at the grocery store and eat it with my chicken. It looked delicious..... but when I ate it, I found it tasteless with the texture of cardboard. Listen, my travels have taught me never to be a picky eater but it made me long for the tomatoes we had in our garden as a kid. I hated working and weeding at 6 AM in that same garden but I loved to eat those tomatoes (except when Mom fried them when they were still green!) I once read something John William Smith, one of my favorite writers, penned to the point that unless tomatoes have cracks and dirt vestiges, they aren't worth partaking of. Jesus had quite a bit to say about fruit and we are taught from the time we are small that tomatoes are fruit and not vegetable. Seven times in Matthew 7, verses sixteen through twenty, He uses the word fruit in the context of prophets. If their fruits weren't good, neither were they. The Master was right: we can look good on the outside and be less than stellar under the surface. Apparently, so can tomatoes at Wal-Mart. And I just thought I was buying my supper.
Applicable quote of the day:
“It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.”
Lewis Grizzard
To hear one of the best- AND FUNNIEST!- songs ever, click below to hear Guy Clark's classic, Homegrown Tomatoes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nitgmAInI18&feature=related
God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
http://www.hawleybooks.com/
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com
1 comment:
mmm! homegrown tomatoes! here in india too, we buy from the market what we call 'hormone tomatoes". recently, my sister-in law got me some tomatoes she grew in her kitchen garden in kotagiri (hill station)and i remembered what homegrown tomatoes were like. strange coincidence that, in the wake of all the conversation we had at home about homegrown tomatoes of yore, i should be reading this blog!
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