Is It Tomatoe or Tomato?

It’s that wonderful time of year when, instead of buying store bought tasteless tomatoes, I can go to my garden and pick fresh, truly vine ripened tomatoes.  I grew up on a farm and so we always had lots of fresh tomatoes in the summer time.  As a kid, the only way I’d eat sliced tomatoes was with lots of sugar on them.  When I got older I learned to eat sliced tomatoes seasoned only with salt and pepper.  Last year I experimented a bit, and came up with an olive oil dressing, which includes different herbs, that I drizzle on my sliced tomatoes.  I top it off with crumbled feta cheese and a small amount of crumbled blue cheese as well.  It is simply delicious, and now I can’t imagine eating sliced tomatoes any other way.  When the apostle Paul writes; “When I was a child, I spoke, I thought, I reasoned like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things”, I think I know what he’s talking about.  And, it’s not about putting sugar on his tomatoes.  He’s talking about growing up in his understanding of God and practice of faith.  The essence of what Paul is saying, is that whatever is not seasoned with love is useless and indeed tasteless.  No matter how great the revelation or how intellectually deep the understanding, without love it’s worse than a store bought tomato purchased in the dead of winter.  Maybe Christian maturity is about growing to the place where we can’t imagine not being loved by God and not loving others as God loves us!