Innards and Outtards

This morning didn't start out so well.

It began with a nosebleed. This is an especially troubling event, as I've had precisely three nosebleeds since the age of 4. I don't consider myself to be one that gets queasy at the sight of blood, but watching my own lifejuice dripping steadily in front of my eyes is especially disturbing. My stomach turned and my head spun; other circular motions were thrown in for good measure. It's not that I'm dreadfully afraid; I'm just not used to seeing things that are usually tucked away on the inside.

Lightheaded and quickly calculating how pints of fluid I'd lost, I stumbled into the kitchen to scrounge up a meager college-student breakfast. As I reached for the fruit bowl, an army of fruit flies swarmed for the moist sclera of my eyes in an attempt to render me sightless. After swinging my arms frantically about my head in my panicked anti-aircraft response, I opened my eyes to slits and quickly scanned the bowl's contents, searching for the bunker housing this veritable fleet of wingéd fiends. I spotted only ripened bananas and whole oranges; no blemishes. The fruit fly fiasco was troubling enough that I delved deeper into the bowl, removing oranges until my line of sight to the bowl's bottom was cleared. A small, oozing puddle of stickiness had pooled in the base of the bowl, my only clue that one of those good-looking fruits was actually a mole, a Benedict Arnold. That ragamuffin orange had turned sour beneath the peel, revealing its nastiness only after it was too late to save; rotting from the inside out.

Tucked away on the inside. Hidden from view.
I get uncomfortable when things turn inside-out. Paper grocery bags after 3 blocks, teddy bears after dobermans, iPhones after concrete – none of these are pretty when innards meet outtards.

After the poor start to the morning, I sat down to some good reading. I opened up my daily devotional to August 29, a passage themed around this verse:

Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. . . . Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.  (Matt 7:17-20, NIV)

I'm not used to seeing things that are usually tucked away on the inside. I get uncomfortable when I do. I don't want to delve deeper, to search for the root of the problem – if I find a bad root, I'll have to address it, to cut away a piece of me that's been carefully and effectively hidden beneath layers of sod and soil. I don't look closely, because there might be a sticky mess that is a whole lot easier to hide than to clean up.
But fruit doesn't rot from the outside in. Outtards don't change innards. Good fruit comes from what happens at the roots. And if there's a root to all problems, and a root of all evil, there's got to be a root of all-powerful goodness, too.

I've been swatting at fruit flies long enough. No more ragamuffin fruits. I'm tapping deep into the source of goodness, the Water of Life. If everything I do prospers, check out Psalm 1:3 to find out why.