Fallen and Fruitful!

The custard apple tree in the front portion of our garden got partly uprooted in the incessant rain in August this year. It had flowers at that time. 

Since then the tree has over fifty fruits, the largest number we have had in the last six years since we came to live in this cottage. 

The opinion of some was to cut it away, but having seen some trees surviving even after the roots damaged, Anna and I felt inclined to give it a chance to survive. 

So forty five days later, it is producing the larges number of fruits it ever produced in the last six years. On an average, we had ten fruits in the tree during the season. 

Yes, it was fallen in the wind! When an adversity struck it, it seems to survive even with more vigour, by bearing more fruits for others. 

A fall is no reason to give up or loose hope. 

A fall is a stress or a pause !

I met a poultry farmer who lost most of his birds of the three thousand that he was ready to sell a week later. He was at a los of thousands of rupees.  It is from the sale of the birds, he usually buys the new chicks to rear them for two months or so for selling them.  So not only that he lost the present lot, but had no resource to buy  the new ones. 

While talking about it to a group of friends one of them offered to pay him the cost of buying the new ones with an allowance of a long period of nine months to pay him back in instalments without any interest.   

To his surprise, he found that the price for the mature birds had gone up by the time he had the next batch of birds to sell. He was able to pay back his friend the whole borrowed money just in two months. 

One might attribute to this casual coincidence. But I cannot subscribe to it. In my involvements with families who have children with developmental needs, I come across many parents who come out of their 'fallen' experience radiantly and resurgently!

Within each of us there is dimension which transcends the material, temporal, and the existential! That to me is the presence of God, about which the Psalm writer in Psalm 139 said, 'I am fearfully and wonderfully made'! 

We are created beings, and the Creator God watches over us and guides us beyond our volitional skills of choices or decisions!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)