JUST MUSING BASELINES
THE FRUIT OF LIFE – SONG, November 11, 2025
When Hup returned home, he had stopped at a local orchard and bought a few apples. He liked Honey Crisp, his wife, MacIntosh. Why did he stop? Well, Phil told him he’d keep his teeth a few more years so use them while he had them, and apples were mentioned in Chapter Two. What intrigued him about the Song of Solomon was how the voice moved easily between voices. Who was talking? First person – then third. Was Solomon merely repeating what he heard like the Apostle John after he was summoned to heaven?
“It kind ‘a made sense,” Hup said to his wife as they sat on a bench in the back yard and enjoyed an apple. Gracie lay nearby.
“How so?” she asked.
“Oh, doesn’t the Father and the Son speak for the church? Do our voices really matter in God’s scheme of things? God is no respecter of men. What does it matter what I say? Still, he stoops. It’s best I listen.”
“Do you think you’re a good listener?”
“We’ve had this discussion before you know,” Hup said and laughed. “I get too excited, and tend to over speak. You know how many times I’ve chastised myself for that? How many times I’ve told myself that I would be as quiet as a haughty Presbyterian and end up a howling Pentecostal?”
“I know, Hup,” she said and paused. Then, echo, echoing echo, “Oh, I know. Good apple.”
“Yeah – and here we sit… not as the apple tree of the woods… you know, later in the Song we learn how a man finds himself sitting under an apple… where the tree wasn’t expected to be – deep in the woods.”
“Not there yet, Hup.”
“Nope, not there… here, it’s astonishing…”
“Astonishing?”
“It’s as if God, the Father, was talking of his son… as that apple tree… taking a form of a man, and watching over him there among the sons of God… that heavenly host, but then… ” Hup trailed off in deep thought.
“Then?”
“The verse transitioned and I found myself there, as I am here with you hun.”
“You?”
“Yes, I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”
“True enough,” she tenderly offered. “I haven’t always known you to be such a man after God’s heart, but I’ve seen quite a change… a deepening.”
“Yeah, thanks hun. Believe me, what you’ve seen is quite extraordinary… inexplicable to our nature.”
“What’s next?
“I don’t know – another apple?”
