Bananas
“Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:4-5
My husband and I have hosted several high school foreign exchange students over the years. We may never travel the world and visit other cultures, but by hosting exchange students we were able to bring a variety of cultures into our home and learn what it might be like to live in other places. One student that found her way into our home and our hearts was a young girl from Germany.
One day after school, our new German exchange daughter was talking about how some kids at school wouldn’t eat the bananas at lunchtime. She began talking about how she was eight years old when the Berlin Wall came down. Living on the east side of the wall, she remembered that things like bananas were not available to her. She had an aunt who was allowed to visit a relative on the other side of the wall once a year, and she would always bring back bananas. She ended the story by saying, “Kids nowadays don’t appreciate bananas.”
In Deuteronomy 6 we read about how God is going to bring his people into the promised land. He says, “It is a land with large, prosperous cities that you did not build. The houses will be richly stocked with goods you did not produce. You will draw water from cisterns you did not dig, and you will eat from vineyards and olive trees you did not plant.”
God is about to drop prosperity into their laps, but it comes with this warning: “When you have eaten your fill in this land, be careful not to forget the Lord, who rescued you from slavery in the land of Egypt. You must fear the Lord your God and serve him.”
We don’t always appreciate what we have until we know what it’s like to not have it. We are often in the greatest spiritual danger during times of prosperity. This may sound like the craziest thing I’ve ever said, but in some ways I am thankful for the challenges I have experienced in my life. Challenges are painful and difficult, but it’s during those times that I have leaned in to God the most. Loving God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength means always putting him first—when you don’t have bananas and even when you do.