During harvest season every year, our Zion members give a helping hand to short-handed farmers. This year, we visited an orchard in Eoreumgol Valley, Miryang, Korea, in order to help with sorting apples.
Eoreumgol Valley located on halfway up of Cheonhwangsan Mountain mysteriously forms ice between mid June and August during midsummer heat, and the ice melts in winter. So it was designated as Korea’s Natural Memorial No. 224. Apples, produced from the magnificent natural environment and the fertile land of Eoreumgol Valley, are a specialty of the village. However, as in any other farming and fishing village, the farmer was also short-handed. Furthermore, he was unable to do his work because he had hurt his arms. When we arrived in the orchard, he had piled up the apples in heaps to grade them. He was stomping his feet in despair because he couldn’t do any work, but after he met us, he gave a smile of relief.
We thought that it would be much easier to grade apples according to the stage of their growth than to pick them, but it wasn’t. We cut the stalks off from the apples first, and then separated the apples with defect from the ones without defect. 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 the good quality ones. Apples that had a good color without any defect though a little small in size were graded as good quality; and the others that had defects or imbalanced in form were graded as poor quality no matter how large they might be. Sometimes, even brightly colored, beautiful apples were graded as having “B” quality due to a very small scratch on the surface; it made me heave a sigh of grief.
The farmer said apples that 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; the farmer’s words lingered on in my mind. Even fruits have to meet the rigorous tandards to be kept in a storehouse. Then, how much more rigorous the criteria for entering Heaven must be! Looking up at the sky smeared with red like a ripe apple, I made a resolution to get rid of my misbehavior and fully resemble God in character so that I may become a good fruit brought into the heavenly barn.