13. Followed By Strawberries

Have you ever been followed around by strawberries?

I have.

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting a parishioner and I noticed a fruity smell in the air.  Yankee Candle?  Air freshener?  Whatever it was, it was a slightly clinging strawberry smell.  But I've been in worse-smelling places.

The smell followed me into my car, and I pondered on whether strawberry could linger like cigarette smoke or incense in your soft furnishings and clothes.  Usually I'd visit my smoking parishioners all on the same day so that I'd only have to wash one set of clothes.  I wasn't all that keen on the strawberry aroma.

Strawberries.  They stalk you.

Coincidentally, the same smell was in someone else's house the next day.  Maybe the church's advent candles, given away to people to help them observe advent, had background notes of fruit?  Or maybe there'd been a job lot of strawberry oil at the local Home Bargains?  

I kept missing the obvious explanation.

It was on the third day that I began to wonder whether the solution was closer to home.

You see, I recalled a story of a man who'd gone around all day smelling poo everywhere he went, and not understanding until he found - I don't know how - a small brown smear on his moustache.  The whole world didn't smell of poo.  The answer was under his nose.

Moustache.  Poo not featured.

And thus it turned out with me.  I knew that my deodorant wasn't strawberry (I'm not Rainbow Brite or a Care Bear, you know!), my shampoo is orange, my toothpaste was minty and my washing powder Ecover.  But I'd missed that I'd bought a fresh tube of hair gel from Netto… and that turned out to be the answer.  The strawberry was in my hair.

Needless to say I was straight into the shower and washed that strawberry right out of my hair and sent it on its way.  And then passed the gel onto someone else.  Good luck!

I've met people marrying for the umpteenth time, and they've been very clear that all three spouses they'd previously had were the problem.  People who've hopped from church to church and found fault everywhere.  People who've been turned down for jobs left right and centre and swear blind that all the interviewers were prejudiced against them.

Sometimes the answer is under our noses.  Sometimes the world doesn't need changing.  Sometimes it's us.

It's a trait I've spotted in quite a few people who think they're prophetic.  Generally it's been people who want to protest at women in roles of responsibility, or the inclusion of our LGBT brothers and sisters and siblings in ministry or marriage.  

Proof of their prophetic status often comprises the fact that they are not well-received.  Rejection, it seems, = what Jesus suffered, what the prophets of old suffered.  And by a leap of strange illogic, therefore, anyone who is rejected must be prophetic, if not actually Messianic.

This is not always straightforward.  "By their fruits" etc.

But sometimes the people rejecting our viewpoint aren't Pharisaical hypocrites.  Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes being the voice of one doesn't mean we're John the Baptist.  Sometimes it means you really are out of step with what the world and the church and God himself are about.

Sometimes Christians are prophets.  Sometimes Christians are idiots.  Spot the difference.

Not all idiots are American, you know.  We grow our own too.

We need to have a good luck under our noses before we start casting stones in any other directions.