Something has been irritating me lately, and that is photographs of sunrises, sunsets, gardens, mountains, and islands. Have I lost any sense of beauty? I can hear a mental gasp in cyber space. Who in their right mind could tire of staring at images of God-created beauty? Not me. I have just checked and discovered that I have pinned 910 pins of islands on Pinterest, my favourite activity on my ipad. This should reveal that I am an ardent enthusiast of the beauty of nature. What I am NOT a fan of is the lurid colour that can now be injected into photographs of anything we choose.
Digressing slightly, I am a great lover of fruit. I love to eat fruit, but I also like looking at it, and marvelling at the different way things grow. I grew up with a grandmother who was a great gardener. We had twenty-two varieties of fruit in our garden when I was a child. My grandmother grew everything from lychees and mangoes, to strawberries and Cape gooseberries, various types of bananas, including "lady fingers", to guavas and China guavas, apples and peaches, to custard apples and pineapples. Needless to say, neither a custard apple nor a pineapple bears any resemblance to an apple. I recall having a friend of my sister spending a weekend with us. When she was served slices of freshly picked pineapple one day, and hearing that it had grown in our garden, she enquired if it had really grown on our own "pineapple tree?" I thought she was being funny and laughed heartily. (It was hard being one of the youngest in a family of adult siblings, especially when they thought I was being intentionally rude. They had no way of knowing that I had a picture in my mind of a type of giant cactus with pineapples sprouting out the branches.)
Besides enjoying nearly every fruit I have tasted with the exception of apricots, I also love seeing how they grow, and thinking of how God has packaged them. A banana is the most perfect takeaway food, all ready to be peeled (unwrapped) and eaten when hunger pangs strike. Another great takeaway is an orange or a naartjie. What is another word for a naartjie? A tangerine doesn't quite do it justice. This is like having a wrapped lunch that requires the washing of hands because of the juice that leaks out once it is peeled. Bunches of grapes, fresh dates, custard apples that need to be eaten with a spoon, fresh peaches and nectarines, great green watermelons that are sliced open to reveal bright pink flesh, lychees that are peeled to reveal succulent juicy white sweetness, crunchy ripe cherries........ I could go on and on.
Fruit is God's sweet shop. Frankly, we can't improve on it. Human efforts lag miserably behind. Imagine the orchard in the garden of Eden, and compare that with Sweets From Heaven. What do humans create? Things that are made in machines, gelatine, food colouring, fluorescent dyes, things that stick your teeth together before wearing craters in them, wrapped in paper or plastic...... No, and a hundred more times, no! We can't improve on anything God created. You are welcome to disagree. I agree that chocolate does not fit into the ghastly category of man made atrocities I have just described. Chocolate, especially Lindt, deserves a blog of its own. But anyone who has been privileged to grow up with fruit to be picked whenever it is in season, has been spoiled for choice. I enjoy the occasional wine gum but I never wake up craving one. I have been known, however, to drive around a city at night looking for fruit.
What has this to do with my recent aversion to photographs of sunrises and mountains? Whenever we feel that we are able to improve on nature, all we do is end up with something that looks as fake as lime green desiccated coconut masquerading as grass on a child's birthday cake. Thanks to Instagram and all its spin-offs we are now able to filter, crop, and change the colours of our photos before we "post" them for the public to see. We are able to photoshop pictures of ourselves to the point of being unrecognisable. People used to meet me at airports clutching a "publicity shot" in one hand, scanning the crowd anxiously so that I didn't slip by unnoticed. Now I have to make sure that I am not photoshopped to look as if I have had Botox, a facelift, lost 20kg, and sport a Mauritian tan.
I can understand our desires to be photoshopped and airbrushed to a degree of perfection we are never likely to attain. But, seriously, can we cease and desist doing the same thing to what GOD created? He doesn't need us to add brighter colours to His sunrises and sunsets, His galaxies and nebulae, His underwater wonderland, or His exquisite mountains, lakes, forests, hills, and oceans. We succeed in making something exquisite look merely garish. When I see these pictures I feel nauseous. I feel the same as when I have seen tiny beauty queens, wearing make-up, hairdos, clothing, and demeanours that do not enhance their baby beauty, but hideously disfigure it. Oh, by the way, this would be my idea of a genuine adult beauty contest. I would wake up all the contestants very early in the morning, take them all down to the beach, where the judges would be waiting, tell them to get into the change rooms and put on a swimming costume in no more than five minutes, then run into the waves. On their way out I would hand each one a comb and a mirror, tell them to comb their hair, and parade in front of the judges. Now THAT would give us a real, natural beauty!
The glorious truth is that God created you as a real person. He loves your uniqueness, He loves who you really are, He loves those idiosyncrasies that set you apart from the crowd. You don't need to make yourself over into someone you are not. You don't need to be made over by some person who thinks they can make you into a better version of the person God made you to be. You don't need fake spiritual colouring to look like a better Christian. God is into authentic, real, natural people, who will allow HIM to do all the makeovers we need.
God bless you, and enjoy being yourself.
Digressing slightly, I am a great lover of fruit. I love to eat fruit, but I also like looking at it, and marvelling at the different way things grow. I grew up with a grandmother who was a great gardener. We had twenty-two varieties of fruit in our garden when I was a child. My grandmother grew everything from lychees and mangoes, to strawberries and Cape gooseberries, various types of bananas, including "lady fingers", to guavas and China guavas, apples and peaches, to custard apples and pineapples. Needless to say, neither a custard apple nor a pineapple bears any resemblance to an apple. I recall having a friend of my sister spending a weekend with us. When she was served slices of freshly picked pineapple one day, and hearing that it had grown in our garden, she enquired if it had really grown on our own "pineapple tree?" I thought she was being funny and laughed heartily. (It was hard being one of the youngest in a family of adult siblings, especially when they thought I was being intentionally rude. They had no way of knowing that I had a picture in my mind of a type of giant cactus with pineapples sprouting out the branches.)
Besides enjoying nearly every fruit I have tasted with the exception of apricots, I also love seeing how they grow, and thinking of how God has packaged them. A banana is the most perfect takeaway food, all ready to be peeled (unwrapped) and eaten when hunger pangs strike. Another great takeaway is an orange or a naartjie. What is another word for a naartjie? A tangerine doesn't quite do it justice. This is like having a wrapped lunch that requires the washing of hands because of the juice that leaks out once it is peeled. Bunches of grapes, fresh dates, custard apples that need to be eaten with a spoon, fresh peaches and nectarines, great green watermelons that are sliced open to reveal bright pink flesh, lychees that are peeled to reveal succulent juicy white sweetness, crunchy ripe cherries........ I could go on and on.
Fruit is God's sweet shop. Frankly, we can't improve on it. Human efforts lag miserably behind. Imagine the orchard in the garden of Eden, and compare that with Sweets From Heaven. What do humans create? Things that are made in machines, gelatine, food colouring, fluorescent dyes, things that stick your teeth together before wearing craters in them, wrapped in paper or plastic...... No, and a hundred more times, no! We can't improve on anything God created. You are welcome to disagree. I agree that chocolate does not fit into the ghastly category of man made atrocities I have just described. Chocolate, especially Lindt, deserves a blog of its own. But anyone who has been privileged to grow up with fruit to be picked whenever it is in season, has been spoiled for choice. I enjoy the occasional wine gum but I never wake up craving one. I have been known, however, to drive around a city at night looking for fruit.
What has this to do with my recent aversion to photographs of sunrises and mountains? Whenever we feel that we are able to improve on nature, all we do is end up with something that looks as fake as lime green desiccated coconut masquerading as grass on a child's birthday cake. Thanks to Instagram and all its spin-offs we are now able to filter, crop, and change the colours of our photos before we "post" them for the public to see. We are able to photoshop pictures of ourselves to the point of being unrecognisable. People used to meet me at airports clutching a "publicity shot" in one hand, scanning the crowd anxiously so that I didn't slip by unnoticed. Now I have to make sure that I am not photoshopped to look as if I have had Botox, a facelift, lost 20kg, and sport a Mauritian tan.
I can understand our desires to be photoshopped and airbrushed to a degree of perfection we are never likely to attain. But, seriously, can we cease and desist doing the same thing to what GOD created? He doesn't need us to add brighter colours to His sunrises and sunsets, His galaxies and nebulae, His underwater wonderland, or His exquisite mountains, lakes, forests, hills, and oceans. We succeed in making something exquisite look merely garish. When I see these pictures I feel nauseous. I feel the same as when I have seen tiny beauty queens, wearing make-up, hairdos, clothing, and demeanours that do not enhance their baby beauty, but hideously disfigure it. Oh, by the way, this would be my idea of a genuine adult beauty contest. I would wake up all the contestants very early in the morning, take them all down to the beach, where the judges would be waiting, tell them to get into the change rooms and put on a swimming costume in no more than five minutes, then run into the waves. On their way out I would hand each one a comb and a mirror, tell them to comb their hair, and parade in front of the judges. Now THAT would give us a real, natural beauty!
The glorious truth is that God created you as a real person. He loves your uniqueness, He loves who you really are, He loves those idiosyncrasies that set you apart from the crowd. You don't need to make yourself over into someone you are not. You don't need to be made over by some person who thinks they can make you into a better version of the person God made you to be. You don't need fake spiritual colouring to look like a better Christian. God is into authentic, real, natural people, who will allow HIM to do all the makeovers we need.
God bless you, and enjoy being yourself.
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