I used to love jelly though to speak of it in the past tense is to in some way lament the passing of a great friend with whom I no longer have any association, when nothing could be further from the truth, though one has to say that it is a dessert probably more favoured by children and more likely to be offered to such an age group. Still, when I see the pupils in school queuing up for little plastic containers of the stuff, I know its popularity is certainly not on the wane and as such on such an occasion, I do manage to sneak the odd tub, with the cook's permission of course, to relive past memories.And the memories centre around the sideboard of the scullery in my childhood home, when jelly making was the day's big event. Essentially it was red jelly of the strawberry or raspberry variety that arrived in little cardboard boxes which when opened, revealed inside a clear cellophane packaging, two blocks subdivided into sixteen squares of the raw material, ready for use. All mum had to do was pour boiling water into her glass bowl, add the jelly now broken into individual cubes, to quicken the melting process, give the whole thing a good stir until there was only re liquid with no lumps and then leave it to set, usually in the fridge. I f I was fortunate and if she remembered, a couple of cubes never made it to the mixture, their final resting place being between my molars. I'm sure I'm not the first person to partake of such goodness-sometimes mum would but the powdered jelly which did the same thing in the end but the level of anticipation never even got off the ground during the preparation process.
When I went to secondary school I again came face to face with jelly but of a less appetizing sort, for this was agar jelly, derived from seaweed, colourless and used in our study of bacteria in the lab. We soon learned how to make this jelly from powder and hot water, in sterile conditions, how to sterilise the little Petri dishes in an autoclave before pouring the liquid jelly into the base and leaving aside to harden. Even this process was done too close to aflame for comfort, just to ensure that no foreign bodies floating about the room got into the dish and contaminated the experiment.
Some days later, we grew our own cultures on the jelly, often using coloured stains to identify their growth and as I moved on through university doing such processes became second nature as we studied germs that caused a whole variety of common ailments and also saw at first hand, how different antibiotics, disinfectants and the like checked or stopped the growth of such tiny organisms that could do so much harm and, left on their own, grow so quickly.
But no matter how much care we took, it was always possible for an unwanted organism to get through the barriers that should have stopped it, though when it grew it was always easy to recognise.
When sin is allowed to flourish in my life, it is easy to spot, especially to an outsider and because Satan looks for every opportunity to get a foothold, I have to be constantly on guard. That's why Peter write 'Be careful! Watch out for the attacks from the devil, your great enemy. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for some victim to devour.' And that's why the words of Psalm 18v30 always ring in my ears. 'The Lord is a shield for all who take refuge in Him.' That way Satan gets his just desserts.
