fruit snacks were my breakfast yesterday as i drove to work. fruit snacks and a piece of toast. i am not a morning person so that is the best i can do as i am frantically trying to get out the door and beat all the other commuters on my morning drive. i was very surprised as i bit into my first red smiley face fruit snack. i always buy the walmart brand fruit snacks, a) they are a lot less expensive and b) i think they taste just as good and even better than a lot of the other fruit snacks. until yesterday i was not aware that walmart offered more than one variety of fruit snack, but apparently they do because when i bit into my red fruit snack it was not cherry flavored. it was tropical punch. delicious! the fruit punch flavoring tasted exactly like the flavor of a juice i bought every day for lunch in 7th grade, and all it took was that one bite of fruit snack to take me back. .
back in the day i thought i was so cool for buying that fruit punch. in elementary school we were never given options for lunch. we just got in line in the cafeteria and ate whatever they put on our plastic trays. our only option was white milk or chocolate milk. but in middle school we had a variety of options. hot lunch line. salad bar. pizza. ala cart. and what did i do with this new found culinary freedom? i bought fruit punch. it's funny how making decisions forces you to grow up, even if the decisions are as insignificant as what you are going to eat for lunch. but you see, after a few months of splurging on fruit punch every day i began to realize that if i just drank water or milk for lunch by the end of the week i would have an extra $2.50, and with that $2.50 i could splurge on something else. something better. ice cream.
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this is what i thought about as i ate my fruit snacks and drove to work yesterday. and this whole fruit punch vs. ice cream analogy made me better understand the purpose of life. heavenly father sent us to earth to learn and grow and he gave us a whole lifetime of decisions. as we make decisions we encounter consequences. and these consequences are what help us learn and grow. our ability to choose is really why we are here. heavenly father knows that fruit punch isn't our best option, or maybe ice cream isn't even our best option, but we have to know that for ourselves. and the only way we come to know that is by making a few unwise lunch decisions.
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it's amazing what biting into a fruit snack can teach you.
3 comments:
its amazing all the thoughts that come pouring in our heads as we drive to work in silence-- i too have been driving to work in silence and taking time to actually pray each morning and ponder things instead of catching up on the latest gossip on the radio-- i have found myself having similar fruit snack thoughts-- He inspires and teaches us if we just take time to listen.
p.s. claire mailed you a card to mom and dads cause we don't have your address :D
I. Love. It!
I think the accidental purchase of the 'wrong' fruit snacks was sent from Heaven.
I'm going to start eating more in hopes of learning things. ;)
I refused to eat in the "hot line" at school because it was so not cool. the cool people at in the fast food line. Then one day in a rush I went to the hot line to save time and boy was that food DELISH - so yet another analogy - don't always get in line with everybody else, who knows what you could be missing out on
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