I’m an urban farmer. I have pots, not land. In those pots though are plants I love and care for. I want to see them thrive. Last night I sat down to the first fruits of my harvest. It had been a quiet day in our house. I worked on the laundry and organizing my pantry. I stored a few boxes and looked for some things that had gone missing. As dinner time approached I wanted something quick. I threw together a tofu scramble, cut up some cucumber and added a few ripe cherry tomatoes to the plate. I was excited to try them. They were beautiful and rich with colour.
As I bit into my first tomato I was shocked. My yellow pear tomato had the texture of a peach and looked like a pear. It was almost sweet but not quite so. This was no tomato like I’d ever eaten.I specifically bought organic heirloom tomatoes to grow. I had expected them to taste different but I had thought different would mean a more intense tomato flavor or a slightly different texture. Nothing could have prepared me for this. Nothing could have prepared me for the tiny fruit explosion that hit my mouth.
My question for you is what have we done to tomatoes?
What have we done?
These heirloom tomatoes are what tomatoes used to be. This is what people used to get when they grew them in the garden. Why did we decide to create one variety and stick with it. What happened to diversity in the food supply? Why would we filter out such great varieties in the name of convenience. It seems as though our society tries to weed out that which is different. People are judged based on certain criteria. Our fruits are expected to be a certain way. Our food has become bland and lifeless. The world has lost much of it’s character.
In so much of life we are expected to fit into a certain mold. When we go to work, to school, to church or to play there are expectations that we must meet, standards we must achieve. We cannot have different textures or looks. We are expected to conform and fall in line. There is so much pressure to fit in. To change. To become what others expect. We need to break free from these expectations. It’s time to bust out of the mold because God reminds us:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;” {Jeremiah 1:5a}
While we may not have been set apart to be a prophet like Jeremiah, we were set apart to be who we were created to be. Each one of us is uniquely made to make an impression on this world, to impact it in ways that may not be known to us yet. The words of the Psalmist in Psalm 139 say it well:
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. {Psalm 139:14-15}
In a world that wants us to conform, that would rather have one variety of tomato and one choice of potato we were made to stand out. Like the Yellow Pear tomato we were knit together in a unique way that would be different, that would shine in a world which seeks to see us conform. It’s time to break free. It’s time to experience the world as God made it, as God made us to be in it. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, let’s embrace that.
