You Can’t Carry Two Watermelons with One Hand

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. – Galatians 5:22-23a (NRSV)

Try it out this summer if you like – but trust me, you can’t do it. Two watermelons. One hand. There is a reason these things become proverbs. They are true!

The best proverbs are comical. When you try to picture someone carrying two watermelons in one hand, it just makes you laugh. It’s so obviously impossible that it’s silly.

But when you are the one trying to do it, it seems quite valid. When you drop a watermelon, it’s the watermelon’s fault, not yours. Who made these faulty, slippery watermelons that don’t stay put, anyway?

Sometimes we can trick ourselves into doing impossible things. We load too much onto our plates. We carry too many things at once. And then one of them drops. Or they all do. Or we drop ourselves, in exhaustion. There is nothing more exhausting than trying to do something impossible.

In Galatians 5:22-23 we are told, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” That’s a pretty tall order if we have to pull off all those thing for ourselves. Fortunately, we don’t have to. They come to us like gifts, fruits from the tree of the Holy Spirit.

It reminds me of one of my favorite prayer songs:

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

In other words. put down those two watermelons you’ve been trying to carry, and let the Spirit do her work.

Prayer
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

About the Author
Lillian Daniel is a preacher, teacher and writer in Iowa who aspires to be a shepherdess on the green.