What Can We Learn from a Tomato?

We have a new favorite tomato in our garden.  This year we planted an heirloom cherry tomato.  We love cherry tomatoes.  Nothing beats them in taste and freshness when you pick one from the vine and pop them into your mouth.  Delicious! We always plant Sweet 100 or the Grape variety and have always been very pleased with the taste and productivity.  In fact, I have discovered several new recipes for them since we always seem to have an abundance of them in past years.  This year has been no different, except with the addition of heirloom to our garden.  Boy, have we been pleased with not only the taste, but quantity produced from 4 plants.  Any heirloom variety is different from the standard we are used to.  They will grow slower, not as diease resistant and less than perfect fruit, but the taste is unbelievable.

Recently while picking them, it occurred to me that I could learn some key things from these  tomatoes.  As we have stated before living on a farm our outlook tends to be different.  We always seem to find lessons and thoughts in the most unusual places, for example tomatoes.

Things are not always what they seem.  This thought occurred to me while I was reaching deep into the bush to get that perfect ripe tomato.  Imagine my surprise when I pulled my treasure out only to discover a bad spot which had been hidden from my view.  Agh - no fair I thought.  But, doesn't this occur in life too.  We often think we may need certain things, but when we get them there's a bad spot on them. The perfect house, the perfect  job, or the perfect toy  is far from perfect  once we own it.

Good things hid from you sometimes.  Just like when picking tomatoes, they often hid within the bush.  You have to move the vines around to find your treasure.  In our  lives, that can occur too.  Sometimes we have to move things around the find the really good stuff.

Too much of a good thing can be bad.  I noticed several of our tomatoes had split open due to much water.  Water itself is a good and needed for survival, but too much of it can cause splits in tomatoes.  This can happen in our lives too.  Sometimes too much good stuff can be bad.  How about overeating? OUCH!

Good things often require hard work and are time consuming to achieve your goal.  In order for us to enjoy tomatoes, we had to do our part.  We had to work to get the benefits.  There really is not a "free lunch" anywhere.  You have that benefit because of someone's else's hard work.

Some things can be right in front of your face.  When I pick tomatoes, I usually go over them several times. I  often find ripe tomatoes staring me right in the face.  How could I have missed that one, I wonder.  Life can be that way.  We often miss our current blessings because we are too busy looking for the next blessing to see them.

Sometimes you get stung . While picking tomatoes a bug flew into my face and stung me.  Will this keep me from picking again? No, I enjoy them too much.  In life, we may often experience "stings", or hurts, but we should not close ourselves off from others.  If we do, we'll miss the joys we can receive from others

.