I like strawberries.
Red and freckled with a top knot of green.
Wearing its seeds on the outside for the whole world to see.
Ya gotta like strawberries.
The Wife brought home two clear plastic containers of 'em yesterday.
These things were trophies.
If strawberries were hunted, these would be over the fireplace.
Honkin' huge and a deep red heading for maroon. I couldn't wait.
I grabbed one, running it under the faucet in a futile attempt at erasing agrichemistry.
Closing my eyes, I took a bite of the giant fruit.
Huh.
A mild strawberry flavor, mixed with a bland sourness, crawled up on my tongue and sat there.
With a sigh.
Like an old lapdog.
I gave it a second chance by popping the whole thing in my mouth.
Same thing.
Juicy.
But no zing.
No pizzazz.
No flavor, really.
I remembered when we first moved to the Little-House-On-The-Corner. The backyard by the clothesline didn't have much grass.
It was somewhat green because of some little-flowered ground cover, a few blades of stubborn grass, a few renegade irises - and wild strawberries.
That first spring I saw these little tendrils running around the backyard like county roads on a state map. The mower passed over it easily and it was at least green, giving semblance of a lawn, so I let 'em go.
Soon there were little white flowers. And then one day I spied a very tiny spot of red.
A strawberry about the size of my fingernail.
On my little finger.
That nail I chew on.
Really small.
Hygiene and health cast to the wind, I bent down, carefully examined it, and popped it into my mouth.
Ohhhhhhhh, momma.
The flavor was intense.
Explosive.
Like strawberry to the 10th power.
Wow.
I remember that taste now as I finish chewing this large, red, "perfect" strawberry.
Huh.
This big strawberry looked the part.
Like that Pharisee's grocery-store prayer touting his own faith and goodness.
Great packaging.
A good-lookin' product.
It was nothing like that small, intensely powerful, largely unseen prayer of the tax collector.
The one that He said was heard by the Father.
Sooooooo . . .
Maybe the point isn't to have a huge, highly marketable, wonderfully packaged, sterilized faith in an small, unflavored god -
But a little, tough faith in an incredibly powerful, color-outside-the-lines, life-altering One.
Yeah.
Isn't that the way it goes, eh?
Once you get a taste that true wild stuff, that processed, sanitized stuff just doesn't taste the same.