For days and days, I’ve had a counter full of prickly pears that my daughter gave me in one of my upcycled bags.  A LOT of fruit and it was just sitting there, getting more and more ripe (which means messy).  I gave a bunch to the chickens but that didn’t really put much of a dent in the pile.  I’d washed the thorns off, making sure to wear my rubber gloves.  Those little suckers are full of needles one can barely see, but trust me, they’re there.  I missed a few and man, they went right through the gloves, into the crease of my thumb and first finger.  Ouch!

I did NOT want to just throw them away and yet I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the time making anything either.  But as I was talking to my sister, she mentioned that she had an elderly neighbor years ago in North Carolina that would make them into juice.  Okay, that should be easy to do, right?  Nope.  It’s work.

Now, this was a process that involved a lot of juice EVERYWHERE.  On me, my arms, the backsplash, the counter, and yet, as I worked, I learned some things that I thought I’d write about.

 

Prickly pear are like people:

~they’re messy.  People are so messy.  They have sharp edges, thorns that will prick you if you don’t use caution as you learn to love them.  And sometimes, it’s just their personality that rubs you wrong or maybe raw. Other times, they have been wounded themselves and have created a very rough exterior to protect their own heart.  Use caution.

~they are similar to the first point in that they take time to find the real good things that are beneficial.  The ‘juice’ is under that hard exterior and so worth the work to get to that part.  It can take years.  I know.  I was that prickly pear:   I was so tough on the outside.  A loud mouth, opinionated, argumentative, disagreeable, and so on.  And on the inside was an insecure young woman that needed someone to love me, to be patient as Jesus did His squeezing. Someone willing to find the ‘sweetness on the inside’.  If you’ve been my friend for any length of time, you know it’s true.

~prickly pear and people have ‘seeds’ that can be annoying.  So very many seeds.  Enough said.

 

The whole process took a couple of hours from start to finish and there were moments I wondered if the time I was investing was worth it.  Yet, watching the container fill up with the skins and the ripened fruit pile higher, I saw it as a holy sacrifice. I was doing something useful with the gift my daughter had given me.

As I squeeze all the juice I can from this post, I want to acknowledge that the two jars I got from both my Omega juicer and then from my Oster blender both have seeds in them.  The Omega really did NOT like those seeds and the more pears I dropped in, the louder the machine got.  So I decided to just strain the blender mix.  Though I strained that batch THREE TIMES, there are still some seeds in the jar.  Not as many, but still, seeds.

Another lesson I learned yesterday is to take the juice with the seeds and deal with them.

And when it comes to people, their external thorns aren’t an indicator of the good fruit God can and will produce if they let Him peel and squeeze them.

(Can you guess which jar has more seeds?)

Until next time…