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 It’s fall up here in Squirrel, Idaho, and that means that things have been mighty busy ‘round the Wesson place. The spuds is in, the fields is turned, the irrigation pipe is stacked more or less neatly by the ditches, and the sheep have all been moved to their winter pasture. Things is startin’ to quiet down, which means one thing: time for Sister Wesson to start findin’ things for me to do. Trust me—she’s on the job.
So yesterday, she chases my carcass outa my Lazyboy and shoos me out to where we have a few scraggly ole’ apple trees, left over from when Great Grandpa Wesson homesteaded up here. Sure sign of a Mormon homestead is apple trees where they don’t belong, an’ Squirrel is generally mighty inhospitable to apple trees. But for whatever gol’ dang reason, this year our trees put out a bumper crop, and we got apples coming out our as—er, ears. It’s my job to bring in the good ‘uns and throw out the falls that litter the ground.
As I stepped out and seen all those blasted, half-rotten, worm-eaten apples that was all over the ground, it occurred to me that those are the apostate apples, having let go of the safety of the branch, and falling on the ground where they get smooshed. When I seen that, I knew I had stumbled on a eternal principle of the gospel as I got kinda spiritually dizzy and had to sit a spell so’s I could ponder the wonders of God’s kingdom.
See, in a way, we’re all just apples. The best of us grow up high on the tree, holding tight to the branches where the sun shines down on us and burnishes our skin to a rosy red. If you ever seen ole’ Rulon’s head after a day in the fields when I forgot my hat, you know just exactly what I’m talkin’ about here.
But down on the lower branches, away from the light, the apples struggle to hang on, and the slightest little breeze, or the wandering hands of the neighbor boy, or the nose of a passing doe, and those apples come right off. They’re the apostate apples—the ones what couldn’t endure to the harvest.
Problem is, if you leave those apples laying around, they attract critters, and before you know it, the good apples what never left the tree are in trouble. No, you gotta git rid a the apostate apples quick-like, or else your good apples’ll get buggy and ate. When I wander out to the “orchard” (it only has three trees, but I call it the “orchard”), I take a shovel, and I fling them sons-a-bi—er, dang apostate apples clean out into the spud field, where the tractor grinds ‘em into the soil and they ain’t nothin’ but fertilizer for next year’s spuds.
I ‘spect that’s pretty much how the Lord sees real apostates. He takes his spiritual shovel and flips ‘em all to hell. But sometimes, he needs help, otherwise the apostates ‘ll start gettin’ the good members of the Church all buggy an’ such. If they all just up and died when they apostatized, then God ‘ld take care of ‘em hisself, but since we ain’t that fortunate, that’s where the Bishopric and the Stake High Council come in. We go wanderin’ around the Lord’s orchard, and tell the apostates to clear the hell out, or we’ll bring the shovels, if you catch our drift. They usually don’t, and nothing really happens, but at least they know we’re watchin’ ‘em.
So here’s hopin’ that you cling to the branches up high on the Lord’s tree, so you don’t fall prey to the apostates and get smooshed in the spud field. If you’re a good apple, you’ll be in the Lord’s pie by an’ by.
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