Faith is Like a Box of Chocolate...

Or, as this case may be, the life of chocolate.
When recently asked to write a devotional for a UMW meeting, that was going to take place at a chocolate shop, I felt inspired to find some way to incorporate our location. This is what I came up with....

My spiritual life is easily comparable to the life of chocolate. My spiritual life started at birth, as does my comparison, but the metaphor is easily transferable to any spiritual journey, regardless of the age it starts at.

Let's start at the beginning, with the cocoa tree. Cocoa trees are evergreens, and very delicate. so delicate, in fact, that they must have other trees planted nearby to provide protection from sun, fungi and bugs, much as we need other people of faith to protect us from birth to confirmation.

The cocoa tree grows 30-40 pods a year, but never all at once. The cocoa trees, much like young Christians, are always growing in some way, constantly producing pods to be harvested. This is also much like how a growing Christian is always learning new concepts, ideas, and pieces of their faith.

Next is the harvest. This, due to the tree's fragility, must be done from the ground, by hand, with specially made tools. Much like confirmation, each pod - or person - is individually cut from the tree, becoming an individual but still part of the larger whole.

After being harvested, each pod is split by hand, and the beans and surrounding pulp are extracted. They are then piled with the other pods' content, covered with banana leaves, and left to ferment in the equatorial heat. Imagine yourself as one of those beans, surrounded by the pulpy-knowledge of your church family, blanketed with the love of God, and left alone with the enzymes and yeasts of your curiosity about this thing called "faith". In the life of a cocoa bean, the more time spent in this stage of development, the more flavor and complexity you have. The longer amount of time you give to this pursuit of knowledge, of "flavor", the higher your value becomes in the future.

And then, the beans are stripped of their pulp, left alone in the sun to dry. This is much like when we complete confirmation. We, at this point, have all the necessary basics to become amazing chocolate - or Christians. However, there is more that must be done to really be great.

The next four steps, I believe, are representative of our lives as adult Christians. Just listen to the words that are used to describe them: roasting, hulling, crushing, refining.
If you are anything like me, these words immediately evoke thoughts and memories of times of emotional, physical, and spiritual trials in your life. I've felt like I was roasting under other's scrutiny of my faith and life choices. I feel as though my hard-shelled exterior, or hull, has been broken down many times, my spirit crushed, feeling each time it happened that I would never recover, but always having my faith pull me through the void. And finally, there is the realization that all this has only helped to refine my faith, my life, my spirituality into the most complex, most smooth, most delicious of people.

Think about the best taste of chocolate you've ever had. Was there only one flavor, or was it a beautiful conglomeration of tastes, textures, and smells? This is who we are as Christians - always growing, cultivating new fruit, influencing the growth of others, and consequentially becoming better than we were. Yet, despite this all, we never really change from that simple, fragile tree that needs constant protection from the harshness of life.