Choices

There are some things in life that rarely change. I know that for most of my growing up life we had this certain brown-ish, boxy couch. It was somewhat of a staple of growing up in the Murray home. Also our TV, it’s been the same since… almost as long as I can remember, perhaps since I was five or six. You can almost always expect household chores to be underway on any given Saturday morning. One thing that I can always remember is a certain bowl in our kitchen. Ever since I was young it’s always been there, and it’s always been full of fruit. Often times it would hold apples, sometimes peaches or pears, apricots or bananas, even plums and oranges could be found therein, but it always had fruit. Sadly enough, I don’t think I ate all that much fruit when I was growing up… probably not as much as my mother would have liked, but this fruit bowl was always out in the kitchen, sometimes set as a centerpiece on the dining room table, but it was always around.

I think perhaps my mother was trying to get across to us an idea with this. She was offering us fruit, not forcing us to eat it, but just had it there as a permanent offering that would could at anytime eat if we so choose. Perhaps had I been slightly more keen on eating fruit I would have done so, but at least I had the choice, and I know that my mother isn’t upset that I didn’t eat much, she was just happy to have offered it. It’s sort of like in Alma when he tells his son, "whosoever will come may come and partake of the waters of life freely; and whosoever will not come the same is not compelled to come;” it’s as simple as that.