Harry Emerson Fosdick told of a curious practice of apple growers in the state of Maine.  A friend of his, visiting an orchard one day, saw the trees laden with apples to the point that the branches had to be propped up to keep them from the ground.  When he exclaimed about it, the owner said, “Go look at that tree’s trunk near the bottom.”  He saw that the tree had been badly wounded with a deep gash.  “That is something we’ve learned about apple trees,” said the owner.  “When the tree tends to run to wood and leaves and not to fruit, we wound it, gash it, and almost always, no one knows why, this is the result.  It turns its energies into fruit.”

A close observation will show that we know many wounded trees in the human orchard of whom this is a parable.  There are those who experience intense suffering, but in their suffering discover the great realities of life and begin to produce the fruit of the Spirit.  The trouble with most of us is that we “want to get to the promised land without going through the wilderness.”