I’m an apple

I’m stealing this little paragraph from a friend’s blog. I read it and it confirmed something I have been mulling over lately. So read it and then my annotations subsequently.

“Women are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. Most men don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples from the ground that aren’t as good, but easy……. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they’re amazing. They just have to wait for the right man to come along, the one who’s brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.”

Because I feel like an apple that has never been reached for, this simile is wonderful to me. Living in American culture, I am often convinced that love is not special or suppose to be something you wait for, rather you should go out there and find and take hold of it, like Daniel Boon in search of Kentucky (did you know he blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, which he settled). When people find out I am single, they immediately want to try and helped me solve my “problem”. Like a unschooled outsider, they wish to teach me the ways of this world called dating and romance. I try not to be annoyed and then not to feel like a loser, who must be so pathetic as not to have a love life.

But this whole apple idea is really great. I am coming to the place of believing it, in spite of what people subconsciously imply about me not having a grid for relationships. I resent it at times, but now I am getting it. The apple that sits at the top of the tree and is picked later then the one down at the bottom of the tree just gets more time to ripen. They are all apples and being picked first does not make them better. Usually it means you are either picked by the wrong farmer or are picked too early.

I also have certain single friends who have been hurt and are convinced that love and marriage are not for them. I am certain that one of the main reasons is because they did not wait for the man, but instead settled for the guy, who did not know how to care for an apple so they were bruised. (I know I am taking it a little far with this one, but go with me.) Now they are messed up and have come to allow their experiences to dictate a belief about all men.

Complicated are the ways of love and painful are the lies we as women believe about ourselves and men, if Jesus does not teach us. He is the best at loving and true romance. I must learn all that I need from Him and not assume that men can teach me the ways of love; for they are as fallen and broken as I….