Olive U

 

(T)hou anointest my head with oil;

my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy

shall follow me all the days of my life:

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

                                    -- Psalm 23:5(b), 6

 

            We have these friends with style. She's a vivacious blonde, full of surprises, like the time she gave her golf partners tees with a delicate fringe of white fur. I still have mine, and it still makes me smile.

 

            Meanwhile, he's the romantic type. Consider the message on the prestige license plates he gave her for her car:

           

            OLIVE U

 

            It took me years to realize that wasn't a reference to an obscure university. He owns a company with olive groves in Spain; hence the pun.

 

            Even though I have never liked olives -- always pick them out of my pizza, and plucked them out of the two martinis I have ever had -- when I think of that so-in-love couple, I think of olives.

 

            Well, two things have happened in recent days that make me think about olives and love, more than ever.

 

            First, a friend of mine who lives in Israel wrote a fascinating story about her husband's new home ec craze. He has harvested olives off two trees from their rented cottage in Galilee. He has had a ball getting all kinds of conflicting advice from his unbelievably multicultural set of friends on how exactly they must be cured, or pickled, to be edible, and then prepared and served. She said it's like Texans and their chili recipes: obsessive!

 

 

My friend's neighbor in Galilee displays his olive crop in the curing process;

note the slashes in the large, luscious fruit.

 

           

            Secondly, though, and tragically, a dear friend's wife committed suicide two days ago. She has been through hell in recent years, and has been struggling hard, but finally gave up. Everyone is devastated.

 

            What's really strange is that my husband tried to call her husband right at the time she was doing it. He had no idea what was going on. Though they didn't connect, when the tsunami of grief and despair was raging afterwards, that bereaved husband knows that his friend was thinking of him, and was there for him, like a buoy anchored in rock. They both know the Holy Spirit prompted that phone call with perfect timing.

 

            Now, how these two things intersect shows once again how the Lord Jesus Christ uses anything - ANYTHING - to teach us about love, and show us that He is there for us, even in the blackest moments of life.

 

            Olives are a picture for us of Who Jesus is, what He has done for us, and what we must do in order to be nourished by love, and to nourish others, too.

 

            To get oil from olives, you put them through a press. It's no accident that the garden in which Christ agonized, the night he was seized, is named "Gethsemane" - "olive press" (Matthew 26:36).

 

            To harvest olives, you have to shake the tree, or literally beat it with a stick (Deuteronomy 24:20). It reminds you of the Romans beating Jesus before the Crucifixion to produce the "harvest" of salvation for us.

 

            Olive oil has always had great spiritual significance; it's no coincidence that the Hebrew word for "anointed" is "messiah," and the Greek word is "Christ."

           

            Now, why I'm telling you all this is that my friend in Israel taught me one more thing about olives: before you can eat them, you have to cut into them, and pickle them in a salt brine to pull out the bitterness. If you don't cut them to the pit, and let them cure, they're inedible. You have to keep draining them and adding more brine, for days or weeks, to leach out the bitter taste. Then, and only then, can the olives absorb the flavors of the spices you want them to have.

 

            So they have to be beaten and shaken and pressed and slashed and burned with salt, or they're not any good.

 

            Know what? It's the same thing for us, through the trials of our lives.

 

            Next time I'm tested, I'll remember that. I won't let despair and hopelessness distract me from God's ultimate purpose, which is always for my good in the long run.

 

            And I hope that my deceased friend's loved ones will recognize that all of the ways that they tried to love her and help her couldn't get through to the bitterness in her heart, much as they tried. Mainly, significantly, it wasn't their fault. And God will still use her as part of His light and His message. What they've been through, He will use, too, to help others, someday, in some way, 'til we all meet again.

 

Why? Because no matter what, He still loves us   . . . and that's a key reason "olive" Him. †