A is for APPLES

I've lived in an apple orchard for the past twenty years, but now it's gone - except for one tree, just kept to remind me of past times. It still has some apples, though I doubt if you would want to buy them, but they might stay long enough on the branches to grow to a size and maturity that might be suitable for an apple pie. I started out by removing a few trees to build a house but over the years, the remaining ones just didn't bear enough fruit to make them viable as a resource worth keeping, so from time to time they became more useful as fuel for the living room fire, branch by branch, until I reached a time in my life when it seemed less hassle just to dig up the rest and turn the orchard into a field where a few cattle now munch grass noisily beyond the confines of my conifer trees. My dad never really worked much with apples on the farm, apart from filling the odd box for a relative or friend who might visit in the autumn and always rented the orchards to a neighbour who specialised in this form of horticulture, so all of my life when I walked through our trees, it was as if I was tresspassing on someone else's property. Our Bramley apples were a great cooking variety but were self sterile so always needed another apple variety to pollinate them in the spring. This variety was a Victoria. It was a strange apple - luscious red skin when it reached full ripeness in late September but often soft and rotten inside and therefore inedible. Mind you, by that stage it had already served its purpose.
I think apples have taught me a lot about life and my faith. I understand now, as I grow older, that when my usefulness diminishes in one area, God will use me in a new way to bring blessing to others. I also know that he doesn't judge me on the basis of how I look but on what I can do for him and I know, just as the Victoria tree was never planted for eating but for how other trees around could benefit through it, the goals that I have for my life may be far from what he has planned for me.
But the greatest thing about my apple orchard, now that it has gone, is the view. I didn't realise what I couldn't see, until I removed what was in my way. Sleep well!