During harvest season every year, our Zion members give a helping hand to short-handed farmers. This time, we visited an orchard in Eoreumgol Valley, Miryang, Korea, in order to help with sorting apples.
Eoreumgol Valley located on halfway up the Cheonhwangsan Mountain mysteriously forms ice between mid June and August during midsummer heat, and the ice melts in winter. So it has been designated as Korea’s Natural Memorial No. 224. Apples, produced in the magnificent natural environment and the fertile land of Eoreumgol Valley, are a specialty of the village. The farmers here are short-handed, like in other farming and fishing villages. The owner of the orchard we visited was unable to do his work because he had hurt his arms. When we arrived, he had piled up the apples in heaps to grade them. He was stomping his feet in despair because he couldn’t do anything, but after he met us, he smiled with relief.
We thought that it would be much easier to grade apples according to their maturity state than to pick them, but it wasn’t. We cut the stalks off from the apples first, and then separated the apples with defects from the ones without defects. The farmer told us to cut the stalks very short because they might scratch other apples.
It was also complicated to separate poor quality apples from good quality ones. Apples that had good color and were balanced in shape without any defect, though they were a little bit small in size, were classified as good quality; and the others that had defects or were imbalanced in shape were classified as poor quality no matter how large they were in size. Sometimes, even large, brightly colored apples were classified as Grade B due to very small scratches on the surface; it made me heave a sigh of grief.
The farmer said that apples which failed to meet the rigorous standards could not be brought into the storehouse no matter how much effort you might have put into growing them. His words lingered in my mind. Even fruits should meet the rigorous standards to be kept in a storehouse. How much more rigorous the criteria for entering heaven must be! Looking up at the sky that was colored in red like a ripe apple, I made a resolution to get rid of my misbehavior and be fully born again to have a warm personality like that of God so that I may become a good fruit brought into the heavenly barn.