Clearing the Hurdles: Perseverance and Pie

*Disclaimer: I wrote this two months ago but only now has it become relevant. I felt like I needed to tell you that...*

At the time that I’m writing this, I have an amazing-looking Dutch apple pie baking in the oven. Once I’d gotten the filling in the crust and the crumb-topping atop it, I stood back to check it out for a moment. And boy did my mouth start watering! As beautiful as this pie will probably look once it’s done, it was not an easy make. I didn’t just snap my fingers or say “presto!” and have it magically appear, contents all perfectly put together, oven-ready (If it was THAT easy, don’t you think I’d just have it already be baked??). No, there was a lot of work that went into it. Honestly this pie that will take less than an hour to bake took about four hours to prepare.

First my mom and I had to cut, core and peel the apples. We didn’t use store-bought apples but the fruit of our own trees. This means that there were buggy spots and bruises to be cut out, filling the majority of the three hours we spent on this step. Next, there was slicing the already cut apples to thinner slices to fill about seven cups. Once this was done, it was some sugar, flour, cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg thrown together with the apples to make a spicy filling. Pour that in the pie crust (which, regrettably, we used store-bought to cut down on time and mess) and then it was on to the streusel topping.
Here is where I found inspiration for this post. You see I had just mixed my flour, brown sugar and cinnamon and was working away at the task of “cutting in” a stick of butter. Now, we don’t own a pastry blender, so I was being a good sport with two butter knives. I have to tell you something vital. In the past when I’ve been following a recipe that calls for cutting in butter, I usually start but then give up quickly because it never looks how I envision. Today, though, was different; I stuck it out and kept cutting away past the point when I would have normally given up. So I’m doing my thing and I’m watching the knives do what they’re supposed to do with the butter and the rest of the ingredients and I exclaim to my mom, “Wow. It’s actually looking right! Normally, I just give up!” And my mom uttered the words that became the idea for this blog post (I’m paraphrasing): “Of course it does. You just gotta persevere. Yes, ‘it’s hard work,’ (she was quoting something I’d said early on in the butter cutting in process) but that’s a big part of adult life. It’s not all just fun, there’s a lot of hard work. But from the hard work comes the really good stuff.”  


This is not actually my pie. Just a pretty picture.

 This made me stop and think over the last few hours (and even more before that, since my mom did the hard work of actually getting the apples together from the trees) and all the hard work that was going into this pie that will, hopefully, be absolutely delicious. I thought about all my aches and pains from cutting the apples (boy do my fingers and wrists hurt!) and decided that it was worth it. I will get to see the “fruit” (see what I did there?) of this labor in a matter of minutes and I bet that will be the best apple pie I will have ever had.
So what’s the point of this story? Well, I wanted to share another way to get past those roadblocks of life See, if we trust God and follow Him, allowing Him to help us over the many hurdles in our Journey (such as Bitterness, Fear and Discontent) we will eventually be rewarded with huge blessings in our lives. But it takes being willing to do the hard things. My encouragement to you is this: Push on – with God’s help – past the roadblocks of life and you will have a warm apple pie to celebrate with. Or something like that.