Chestnuts

Ann gave us a bag of chestnuts on Sunday. How time flies, I remember it was just a while ago when a group of us went to her farm in Lang Lang last year. It must have been more than a year now that a new season of harvest has arrived.

So I got a handfull and sliced the shell lightly with a cross before baking it in the oven. This will stop them from exploding under heat like pop corns. They are very nice to eat freshly out of the oven. Sarah and I were eating it and making a mess on the dinning table. As a preacher, I find that i always tend to see illustrations in the most unlikely places - you see, chestnuts grows in tree and the fruit doesn't look appealling at all. They are full of dense long prickly thorns. In order to get to the nuts, one has to equip with thick gloves and gumboots. You will need to pluck the fruit, throw it on the floor, step on the thorny fruit so it may split and spill out the brown nuts.

I am not sure how they plant the trees, I suspect you can do a bud-graph but the seedlings have to grow from the seeds! To stretch our imagination further, every seed is a tree - is it not? "I am eating another tree now" so i was telling Sarah, who is used to my random and weird comments.

The Bible said "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Sam 16:7). And he will get into a lot of trouble to get the best out of us even when we are pretty ugly and hostile on the outside - like a furry, prickly chestnut fruit!