"If you like it, you can keep it." Really?

 

Sheila and I bumped into our friends Jonathan and Susanna Anderstrom at The Pumpkin Patch. Jonathan is a great photographer and a fine Christian man, so I handed him my camera and he took this picture for us.

Back to The Pumpkin Patch ....

Angela and John pulled Norah around in a wagon (a brilliant move indeed), while Lydia walked through rows and rows of pumpkins looking for a pumpkin she liked and wanted to keep.

Everyone was happy.

Lydia’s parents showed her to a pile of pumpkins and told her she could choose a pumpkin and keep it. She picked a pumpkin and put it in the wagon. She got to keep the one she liked.

It was great.

She made her choice and lived with the consequences of her choosing.

Shortly thereafter, on the far side of The Pumpkin Patch, I heard some lady tell her son, “Hurry up and pick your pumpkin. Choose one and we’ll take it home.”
He looked at her, looked at me, looked down at the pumpkins and picked one up. 
I heard him say, “I like this one!”

She’d looked at him and told him she thought something was lacking in his pumpkin so he couldn’t keep it.

He picked another one and she told him it wasn’t good enough either.

She found fault with every pumpkin he picked!

Apparently, she had minimum standards for acceptable pumpkins and her kid kept picking pumpkins he liked instead of pumpkins that met her standards.

When she told him he could pick his own pumpkin, she didn’t mean it.
She really meant, “Whether you like your pumpkin has nothing to do with keeping your pumpkin. If you like a bad pumpkin you may lose your pumpkin, but don’t worry, I’ll make sure you end up with a better pumpkin than the one you like."

Ugh.

It was dreadfully frustrating when I realized the truth of what I was hearing. Even as she was telling him he could keep his pumpkin if he liked it, she knew there was no way he’d be able to keep any pumpkin she deemed inferior, even if he liked what he'd chosen and wanted to keep it,
… so I wonder why she told him again-and-again that he could?

 

James 5:12b  -  Let your “Yes” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No,” lest you fall into judgment.