Wally the Peach

Three dozen of us sorted into vans on a cool July morning in Bend like fresh-picked peaches heading to market. Half a day later, we arrived at Gleanings for the Hungry, a YWAM mission in Dinuba, CA, set amidst endless groves of fruit trees in the San Juaquin Valley, under a sweltering sun that clocks in early and works hard all day.

One of the leaders there has written a children’s book, called Wally the Peach, a story of a discarded peach who learns what it means to serve and glorify God. That’s the story we learned as we hustled all week to process half a million unmarketable peaches into food for starving children.

Wally was a peach that looked different than the peaches in the produce section of Safeway. He wasn’t chosen first, and he questioned, even grieved, getting passed over. I read this book silently one evening at Gleanings with Jacob and Jayden looking over my shoulder. Perhaps it was fatigue or the sulfur dioxide in my lungs (sprayed on the peaches to ward off pests), but I felt an overwhelming heaviness as I sat between two precious peaches who knew that story better than me.

In the final pages of the book, Wally came to understand he was called to a special purpose for God’s glory. Rather than being sold at market, he was to be donated to the mission, turned into dried fruit, and shipped to a foreign country to feed needy children. Thankfully, before I could pretend the tears were only sweat from the late-day heat, Jayden lightened the mood with his dark sense of humor. “You know they’re going to eat Wally, right?”

Jesus’s words in John 12:24-26, explain Wally’s calling well:

Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. The one who loves his life will lose it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me. Where I am, there my servant also will be. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

We are called to a life of rejection, death, and grief. We are called to reject the world’s ways and follow Jesus toward a life of service to God, which might cause us to get eaten like Wally. There was an incident at the end of the week that squeezed this truth into me like a rotten peach in God’s fist.

My daughter has a limb difference, less challenging or noticeable than my reading-buddies’, and therefore, I often forget about it. She entered Six Flags and enjoyed its worldly pleasures like thousands of others, but near the end of the day, a ride operator noticed her malformed hand while doing a safety check. According to his training and interpretation of the rules, she was not allowed to ride the roller-coaster and was forced to exit while her friends and onlookers were propelled into the sky at high speeds.

In tears, my precious peach told me this story while my blood boiled hotter than the Dinuba heat. “I’m going to take this park down! If my daughter can’t ride Full Throttle, then nobody can!” were the thoughts rotting inside of me.

Thankfully, I was surrounded by Jesus people, and we prayed together before I stormed the park’s headquarters. With a firm grasp of Six Flags policies and a youth pastor in tow, I shared my dismay with the manager. She explained her company’s absurd interpretation of, “a minimum of three full fingers with the ability to hold on with a firm grip.” My BS in Mathematics and MA in Education offered no help as I tried to explain that my daughter has five full fingers, which is greater than three.

Yet, during the fruitless debate, I had compassion on the manager, and we ultimately agreed that I would not be avenging my daughter’s plight with any lawsuits or crimes that day. Rather, I blessed the manager, who said we were the kindest customers she had dealt with the whole day.

We are called to a greater purpose than adrenaline rushes and earthly happiness. Once I grasped that truth, the thrill of a roller-coaster seemed less significant, like the shape or color of a ripe peach. What really matters is what God wants for us, and in the case of Wally the peach it was to be food for the hungry. In my case, it was to be an encouragement to the park manager and my daughter.

What about your case? Have you let God grip your heart and squeeze you toward his will? Are you cultivated for his mission and ripe for his service? Are you like Wally the peach? We encountered God in many ways on our mission trip to Dinuba, and you’ll hear many amazing testimonies in the coming weeks at Foundry Church. I hope all these stories draw you toward the rich, fruitful, abundant calling of Jesus.