SPIRITUALITY OF BEARING FRUIT -#2

You did not choose me but I chose you. 

And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last (Jn 15:16).

SEVEN LESSONS FROM A FRUIT TREE

Lesson #2: YOU ARE CALLED TO BEAR YOUR FRUIT!

Do not try to bear some other fruit. 

You are chosen, chosen to bear fruit, chosen to bear your fruit, not someone else's. At times I refrain from bearing my fruit considering it immaterial - how do I come to that conclusion? By one of the most detrimental of all habits: comparison. No one in the right sense will expect a peach from a mango tree or an orange from a vine branch! Each tree has its own fruit to bear and that is what is expected of that tree. Just because a tree bears tiny cherries, it does not become in any way less valued than a tree that bears a mega size jack fruit. As Mother Teresa would put it, it is not so much how big are those things you do that matter, but how much love you put into them, that truly matters. 

The second malady that affects one in bearing one's own fruit, is that which is called 'the pleaser phenomenon'. When one wants to bear a fruit, merely because someone wants them to, they are giving into pressure or into the pleasure of pleasing people. A person who does something, however good that action could be, merely at the behest of someone else, has already lost the merits of that action. 

Do not think demeaning oneself is a virtue; it is not. Neither would demeaning others be a virtue. Accepting oneself and others as they are, that is the right perspective in life. 

Consider John the Baptist who with no feeling of regret announces that he is not the expected Messiah. He neither wanted to bask in a borrowed glory nor did he shy away from the limelight in preparing the way. He bore the fruit that he was to bear and today stands a great icon of having lived his life to the full, having borne a fruit however insignificant, the fruit that he had been appointed to bear.