Thoughts From A Juice Extractor

Reference: Matthew 23:1-4

This morning I came home from talking with Deb and Sharon about a variety of subjects and God placed on my heart the verses above.  A bit later I decided to make veggie and fruit juice in my nice Cuisinarts juicer my wife and daughter got me for Christmas.  I kept telling Cynthia I’d make the juice, but just kept “thinking” about it.  Time for action.

For those of you who enjoy fresh juice, this is something I think you will greatly appreciate; I hope the rest of you will still get something from this short story as well, so hang in there!

Two different products: vegetable juice and fruit juice, one machine. Different recipes go through the same process with very different results. That’s pretty obvious. What I want you to know is it’s really fun to juice the products! Dropping in tomatoes, kale, parsley, beet leaves and stems into a machine that’s buzzing with anticipation is a blast! Toss them in the hopper and the extractor does its job in no time flat. Poof! Plants become veggie juice. Oranges and apples combine to make a delicious fruit beverage (no preservatives required…we’ll consume them in the next few days). This machine can juice eight pounds of oranges in about two minutes.

That’s the fun part! Washing vegetables and peeling oranges is time consuming and just plain work. I wouldn’t dare drop in dirty vegetables or oranges with peel into the machine, no way, that’s just not sensible. Everything gets washed and prepped. When the juicing is done, it’s time to clean up. Boring. No fun. Blah!

Here are a few lessons for your consideration:

• Prep work and cleaning up are essential parts of the process, but they are not the reason for the process. I don’t want to make juice for the pleasure of peeling oranges or washing dishes, I’m looking for a healthy beverage.  The ground work we are laying is for helping people become totally committed to following Jesus Christ…that’s our juice!  The surrounding activity is necessary, but I don’t want to ever lose sight of that main objective.
• Making juice by myself isn’t nearly as fun as doing it with my daughter. The last few times we made juice together. Same process, same product, but a lot more enjoyable because we spent time working together. Then we sat down and enjoyed the juice—together.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, we are prepping the fruits and veggies for an amazing meal. We need to be diligent about carefully cleaning, peeling, whatever, before making the juice lest we end up with a batch that isn’t edible.  When it’s done, we need to be willing to clean up and put things together for the next batch. After tasting the product, we might need to make adjustments to the recipe or the process in order to make a better juice next time.

Don’t just gulp the juice, take time to enjoy it and, most importantly, enjoy it with others. We’re not in this alone.

Let’s work together and make some juice! 

I pray you’ll have a blessed day!