Consider the Banana: An Object Lesson

A banana as an object lesson? Yes, indeed. If we let it, everything can become an object lesson.

I like my bananas; I have half of one every morning. But I like them just right, not too green, not too ripe.

Unfortunately, bananas have a very short shelf life. Stores have a hard time with that and a certain percentage of them must be discarded. (I know some like banana pudding made from overripe bananas, but that’s not the same; that’s another object lesson.)

From display case to dumpster, therein lies the lesson. I have a short shelf life too! Compared to Methuselah I’m just a short spit. (This expression derives from little boys trying to see who can expectorate the furthest.) But even Methuselah, with his 969 years, found his way to the dumpster.

So here I am. I have had my ‘green’ time, a time when I was learning what life in the presence of our Creator was about. I learned I was a man, perhaps with “honor, but I understood not”. Therefore I was “like the beasts that perish” (Psa 49:20). I considered my ways.

And I will have my ‘overripe’ time (I’m not too far from it now) — when my desirability factor will wane until at last I will be taken out behind the market and disposed of.

I have had an ‘optimum’ time, the Lord be praised. I’m still in it, my body being all together (although there has been some gravitational slippage). My senses are still with me; I can still find Habakkuk.

This optimum time has been the longest, and it is in this phase that I am showing whether my life has been only an addiction to “the vain philosophies of men”, or if I have been making some truly meaningful demonstration of manifesting the Lord in myself.

Banana I may be, but God made me, God called me, and God is saving me. For saints there will come a day when such issues will have faded away; in fact we are told that it will happen “in the twinkling of an eye” (1Cor 15:52). Our Hymn 388 says it so well: “We shall be like him, pure in heart and sinless…”

The next time you see a banana, “remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth”, and at each stage of your life. God created us, not in vain, but for a glorious pur­pose. Bananas are temporary — we can be eternal.