A Shrivelled Heart
Ian Gould - 7 Sept 2014

Once you do what you think you shouldn't do you may find that your heart feels small and shrivelled. Kind of like a mandarin that you have kept for too long in a fruit bowl. Often mandarins start off with thick skins, ours do anyhow. They are well-protected and easy to peel. The mandarin itself is plump and juicy. That's the way they should be. Full of flavour and with plenty of water in them to make them taste sweet as well as thirst quenching. 

My heart can often be like that juicy mandarin. I can sometimes go for hours like that. I have gone for days on occasion or perhaps even a week with a heart that is regularly filled with living water. I feel sensitive to the needs of others and I am a joy to be around. I feel full of the joie de vivre (joys of life). Mandarins like this smell great and the sweetness inside is refreshing.

Not so with the shrivelled mandarin. It is difficult to get into for a start. The skin is thin and tears easily. Once you get past that, if you take enough time to get past it, you will find that the fruit is rather crinkled. The look isn't great either. It is dry, and hard to get the segments apart.

Many people give up on the mandarin at this stage, realising that the look and feel of this fruit is not very promising. If you decide to sniff your food about now, you will find that there is not much smell. You'd be forgiven for chucking the fruit into the compost pit, hoping that it may do some use there. Well, if you are the really brave and perhaps are rather hard-headed, or just famished, you may take that bite. Sweet? Yes, but a bit sickly. Sticky as well. Good flavour, but short on the vital water content.  

All, in all I'd rather hydrate. Drink in Living Water, stay healthy, make the place more attractive by giving off a good "smell", and I may even look better too. Why not join in drinking from the One who promised that if you are thirsty, you can go to Him, drink deeply and then living water can flow out of you? Why not improve the environment by being a juicy mandarin instead of something similar to a raisin or a prune... What is a dried mandarin called anyhow? A mandaprune? A raisarin? Whatever it's called it doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Why not have a heart full enough to be generous to others.

Come, all who are thirsty... and I will give you living water to drink.