I grew up thinking that the fruit of a Christian life was to lead someone else to Christ.  (Not that it isn't.) So I was always trying.  With only occasional success.  And then I read Dawson Trotman's book "Born to Reproduce."  And Galations 5:22 took on new meaning:  "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance."

Those nine fruits of the Spirit are the natural result of Christ coming to live in your life.  They are products of His holy Spirit within you.  And later, when I was reading Psalm 1:3, I got an entirely new perspective on bearing fruit.

"And you shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth your fruit in your season..."   That passage is saying that if you are planted by a source of water, and the ground you are planted in is good ground,  then fruit happens.  You don't have to grunt and groan to produce those nine kinds of fruit.  They happen.  Naturally.

And the beauty of it is...the seed for the new tree is inside the fruit.  In due season, fruit falls to the ground and another tree grows...born to reproduce in like kind.

What the Bible is saying is that if the Holy Spirit lives within you, you will be loving.  You will be joyful.  You will be peaceful.  You will suffer quietly.  You will be gentle and good, meek and have temperance.  And your faith will be visible to others!

Those are the qualities that draw people to you--and ultimately to Christ.  You simply share why those qualities exist in your life.  "Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you for a reason of the hope that is in you..." 1 Peter 3:15

It isn't hard at all to share why you are hopeful.  It is a natural product of being planted in the soil of the Word, by the River of Water that rises up in your veins--Christ Jesus.  You are just a tree.  God does the "doing."  You can't produce fruit seeds on your own.

If someone told you they could give you eternal life--guaranteed--for a thousand dollars, you would dig up the money in a heartbeat.  But when a man by the name of Jesus offered it to people, it was free--with a hitch.  He said, "If any will come after me, let him take up his cross daily and follow me."

1.  It doesn't cost anything.  It is a matter of the will.  If anyone "will."

2.  "Come after me."  You come second, He comes first.

3.  "Take up your cross." (He had a  cross: death to himself.  He asked God, "If there is another way to do this, please do it.  However...not my will but yours be done. )  You also have a cross.  Pick up the cross of dying to your own selfish nature.  Give yourself over to the will of God.

4. "Daily."  Every day for the rest of your life, God's will becomes yours as well.  Luke was the only Gospel writer that used the word "daily."  He was a physician.  He was specific in the prescription he gave to us from the words of Jesus.

5.  "Follow me."  You go where he goes.  He has left a path to follow.   You probably need to look into the book of Luke and read the directions of the path.

That's it.  A five step plan for eternal life.  Free for the taking.

And you need to read the four gospels on a regular basis.  They are not like other books--they are inspired by God, and every time you read them you get something new.  Something you didn't see before.   Most of the men who wrote those books spent three years with Jesus.  Their account is very personal and compelling.

This has been the strangest February and March I've ever seen.  Temperatures going from freezing to 85 degrees nearly every week.  Up and down.  The redbuds began to bloom in February.   The redbuds never bloom here until my birthday--give or take a week.  Sunday was my birthday.  March 26.   I'm sure the peach blossoms froze and killed the peaches.  Strange, strange weather.

And I've already been busy in my yard for a month planting things.  I'm sure that it will freeze again and ruin what I have done, because this is Oklahoma.  If you don't like the weather, wait a minute.  But I get itchy to plant things when it is warm.

Today, my next door neighbor mowed my lawn.  It was up to my ankles and the lawn man (mower) doesn't ever come to mow until the first week in April.  When the grass is so bad that your neighbors come and mow your lawn, you know the growing season is really out of kilter.

However, I'm not complaining.  It just means more spring days as far as I am concerned.  Time to plant tomatoes.  And parsley and green peppers and basil.  Most of it doesn't live.  But I refuse to lose my optimism.  You can't predict in Oklahoma what is going to make it.  One year one thing survives, and the next year something else makes it.  But you can always count on okra.

I've always had good luck with asparagus--I don't eat much of it, but it's good to have something to give away to my neighbors--so I don't feel like a leech all the time.  Everyone around here is so good to me.  I am the "token widow" on the block.  Everyone takes care of me.  They know my kids have forbidden me to get on a ladder, so they even check to see if I'm being "Good."

It's hard to come to grips with the fact that I am considered to be "old."  I think about all the "old" people I have tried to help through the years and wonder if they considered themselves to be old.  I don't.  I'm the same person I've always been.  At least inside my head.   It's my body that is betraying me.  And yes, Sunday I was 79.  Good grief!  How can that be?  My head tells me I'm thirty-one.

As long as I'm talking about Scott, I'll tell this one.  He was a wild wooly bugger from the git-go.  When he learned to pull himself up on the side of his crib, it took only a day or two before he could scale it.  He couldn't have been very many months old, but he was climbing the walls and the counters--using the drawer handles as steps--and whatever else "needed' climbing.  Action. That's what he wanted.  After having had the girls, who were 6 and 4 who were reasonably normal, he was an altogether new experience.

I put him down for a nap one afternoon--and watched to make sure he was asleep before I left the room--I already had his number and wasn't about to leave before he was asleep.  But just to be sure, a few minutes later,  I went back to check on him, just in case.  And he was gone.  I looked all through the house, the closets, and everywhere outside, and couldn't find him anywhere.  (He had already learned to pull something up to the door, climb on it and open the door--so I knew he might be outside.)  I was frantic.  I called the MP's and they started an "on base" search.  (We were in Beaufort S.C. at the Laurel Bay air station--next to the water--which Scott loved.  He was a fish snorkeling and blowing bubbles in the bath tub when he was 4 months old--like I said, wooly and wild--so I wondered if he had made it to the bay which was only a block away.)

The search with the MP's went on for an hour or so with no luck, so I went in the house, sat down and tried to calm myself and to try and think like Scott would think.  (Who could possibly do that.) Where would he go?  That's when I searched the house again--closets, etc., everywhere.  I finally looked in my room under our bed again and there he was back under the bookcase headboard.  He had crawled out of the crib with his blanket, and curled up with it out of sight under the headboard.

I gave up on containing him.  For the next two years I never let him very far out of my sight.  He was impossible to predict.  "Train up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  I'm afraid I won't live long enough to see that happen.  I don't think Scott will ever be "Old."

I told this story a few years ago, but with Easter coming up, It's worth telling again. After your children are grown, when they get together, you find out all kinds of things that you never knew before.  I thought I had them under control when they were growing up. But obviously I didn't.

      We had moved to California for five months, waiting on Ken to retire.  We were living on base at El Toro in officer's housing.  Which wasn't much.  Two bedrooms, one bath.  Adequate, but nothing luxurious.  Pat was in the fifth grade.  Becky in the third.  Scott had just turned five years old.

     There was a big tree in our front yard and the street was pretty busy.  Easter was coming up.  So, Pat said she asked Scott, "Hey, you want to be Jesus?" Whatever Pat and Becky thought up, Scott did.   and unbeknownst to me, the girls got ropes and tied Scott to the tree with his arms out, fastened to a couple of branches like a cross.   "You're gonna be Jesus in our Easter pagent," they told him--and topped him off with a crown of thorns.  Probably from a rose bush.

But after a while,  the girls got tired, went in the house and left him there.   Naked as a blue jay except for a tea towel wrapped around him in an appropriate position. The only bad thing was, after awhile, he lost his loin cloth.  Their intentions were religious.  It just didn't turn out that way.  I don't know who cut him down.   You would have thought one of the neighbors would have told me.  I also don't know why I never heard about it until they were grown.

At least the girls knew the crucifixion story.  They didn't disobey.  I never told the girls not to crucify their brother.  If I had, I would have told them not to crucify him in the front yard on a main street.

     "We finally remembered that he was still hanging out there and cut him down and gave him his clothes," Pat said.

     "They crucified me!  Scott said,  There I was, my arms tied to a tree, and my...."  (Unprintable.  You can fill in the blanks.) " Pat said:  "He was no worse for wear, and nobody reported a naked kid tied to  a tree."   Becky said: "I had nothing to do with it."  Knowing Becky, she probably thought it up.

The most important moments that pass us by are not Paris flea market purchases, or cactus candy.  From what I wrote about yesterday, you might think that I was talking about buying stuff.  No.  I was just saying that missed opportunities cannot be reclaimed.

The most important things that we miss are those moments when the opportunity to say something meaningful to another person passes us by.  We worry what they might think.  We worry that they will find us "different."  Or odd.  Or too religious.  I encourage those people that I teach to practice "speaking up."  You can learn how to do it.  I encourage them to develop a spiel.  Opening dialogue.  Verbal interaction in a way that doesn't cause another person to feel like you have an agenda.

Because lets's face it, there are a lot of rude pushy "so called Christians" out there that don't really care about people.  They just have an agenda.  They like to argue.  They like to put people down.  They like to look "holy."

But if you sincerely want to share Christ, you have to care about the other person.  My opening "spiel" usually goes something like this:  "Have you lived in Edmond very long?  I'm new here."  Which usually opens the door to conversation.  And down the line somewhere I might ask: "Have you found a church here that you like?"  That is usually it.  I normally wait till next time I meet them to find out more.  Unless my questions lead to more discussion about churches--or not.

But if you really don't care about the individual or their spiritual condition, forget it.  You won't be able to be sincere no matter how hard you try.  Unless you are a great actor--and why would you want to do that.  We aren't oscar winning hypocrites.  We love God.  God loves us--and we want others to know that God loves them, too.  Beating people over the head with a Bible won't accomplish that.

Missed opportunities come and go because we aren't ready to identify them.  Or we don't know what to do with them.  Moments pass us by, never to be repeated.  Take the business of recognizing opportunities seriously.  Develop an attitude of bravery.  God will be there.  He's in it with you.  It's His plan anyway.

I bought more azaleas.  And yesterday John--my gardener who comes every Monday for a couple of hours--planted them.  Coral Bells.  I've tried to find some for the last two years, but everyone sells out before I can get any.  They are a cultivar that is especially "Oklahoman."  But Saturday when I went to the nursery, I intercepted a man who was bringing a cart of them in, and grabbed four.  I went back later to get a few more and they were all gone.  Should have bought them when I found them.

There are so many things I should have done when I had the chance.  The moment comes, you hesitate, and the moment goes.  We seem to think there will always be another day--but that's not always true.  Especially with children.

I remember once, when we were coming to Oklahoma from out west--probably California--we told the kids they could buy one souvenir apiece.  Becky wanted cactus candy.  But it was so expensive that I kept saying, "It will be cheaper the next time we stop."  But it never got cheaper and the next time never came, because the next place didn't have any.  And the cactus candy in the desert was too far behind us to go back. Pat and Scott got what they wanted.  Becky didn't.  She was just a little girl and was so disappointed.  Makes me sad to remember.  Wish I could go back.

You can't go back.  When the moment comes to do something, don't hesitate.  I am so analytical that I over think every thing I do.  Not good sometimes.  "I should have," are sad words.  Because you can never capture the moment or the opportunity again for some things.

I've been to Paris a number of times.  And when we go, I always love the flea markets.  People come in to a certain street, back up to the sidewalk and unload their vans.  Hundreds of treasures spill out onto the sidewalks.  My kind of fun.  But deciding what to buy escapes me and while I've been trying to make up my mind about something, someone else buys it.  Becky says, "Quit thinking about it.  Just buy it. You want it.  It's really cheap.  You won't be back here for years--maybe never.  What is your problem?"  Not that things are important, but memories are.

She learned that lesson in the desert when she didn't get her cactus candy.  It's a memory.