Seedless

Gallagher destroying a watermelon.

I bought a seedless watermelon.

I know this because the sticker on the watermelon clearly said SEEDLESS.

This morning, I cut it open.

Seeds.

Not one or two little white seeds that I could pretend weren’t really seeds.

A gazillion black seeds.

I was meal prepping, and I had things to do.

But now I had to stand at my kitchen counter and remove approximately 10,478 seeds from a seedless watermelon.

I thought about dumping the whole thing into a plastic bag and returning it to the grocery store, but it was 4:30 AM, and that wasn't possible.

At first, I attacked the seeds with the same chef’s knife I'd used to cut the watermelon.

Not ideal.

So, I grabbed a paring knife and started removing them one at a time.

Somewhere between annoyance and resignation, I started thinking about all the other things in my life that didn't turn out exactly as advertised.

Or, more accurately, exactly as I thought they had been advertised.

There is a difference.

And there’s been a lot.

Standing at my counter this morning, wishing I could just "Gallagher" the watermelon (a '90s reference), I found myself strangely comforted by all the false advertisements and all the stickers I'd simply misunderstood.

The watermelon wasn't what I expected.

But it wasn't spoiled.

It just required far more from me than I had anticipated.

Maybe some of the best things in my life have, too.

Maybe the issue isn't that there are seeds in every aspect of life.

Maybe the problem is that I, too often, expect seedless.

Silly human.

Back to my seeded seedless watermelon:

I kept whittling away at that thing until I had to stop halfway through.

I had other things to do.

So, I put the other half aside and tended to a few other time-sensitive tasks.

The remaining half and its 14,409 seeds would have to wait until I had the time and bandwidth to deal with them.

That struck me, too.

We don't have to remove every seed at once.

We do what we can.

We put down the knife.

We tend to the things and people who need us.

And, when we're ready, we come back.

With a smaller knife.

And start again.

By the time I finished, I had a large container filled with beautiful pieces of watermelon.

No one looking inside the container would ever know it took me approximately 68 minutes to deseed the seedless watermelon.

My family certainly won't.

They'll open the refrigerator this week, grab some watermelon, and eat it.

They won't know how many seeds were in it.

They won't know how long I stood at that counter in two different shifts.

They'll see the finished product.

That's what we see in other people's lives, too.

The marriage. The children. The home. The career. The faith.

We see what made it into the container, not what was left on the cutting board.

 God sees the process.

He knows every seed we've dug out.

Every disappointment.

Every time something wasn't what we expected.

Every private struggle behind something the world considers a blessing.

He saw the cutting board.

Heck, He provided the knives.

God never promised me a seedless life.

But my faith tells me He’ll be there while I work through the seeds.

And maybe that's what this ridiculous watermelon was showing me.

The watermelon was mislabeled.

It was not seedless, as expected.

But it wasn't spoiled.

There are seeds in beautiful things.

There is difficulty in good lives.

There is struggle inside blessings.

Other people may never see what it took to get from the cutting board to the finished product.

But God does.

And the fruit is still good.