“Have you ever had pun’kin blossoms?” Elmer asked.
“Pumpkin blossoms? No,” I answered tentatively. “What are they?”
Elmer Brandon was the first person I ever talked to from Beaver Chapel. Now I was his pastor. It was my first day on the job and he was helping me pick up an appliance. We were driving along in his van when he popped the pumpkin blossom question. I was leery of becoming the brunt of a joke when I was such a young pastor and trying to establish myself as someone to be taken seriously. But Elmer seemed a man without guile. He glanced over at me with a glimmer in his eye and a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“The pun’kins are in the blossom now. After we take care of this little chore I’ll fix ya’ some,” Elmer promised.
We drove on in silence for a while longer and I tried to imagine what it was like to eat a blossom of anything.
“How do you fix pumpkin blossoms?” I asked, still protecting myself from being the brunt of a joke I imagined people play on young pastors fresh from
their studies of metaphysics and philosophy and other esoteric pursuits far from common life.
“Well, Pastor you dip ’em in butter and then you roll ’em in a little batter and fry ’em.”
“What do they taste like?”
He thought on that for a minute while the fields flashed by outside and then finally answered; “I can’t really say, but one calls for another.”
My life goal is to nudge everyone I meet closer to Jesus. That is the purpose of my little stories. Each of them is intended as a Godward nudge. Each one is a glimpse of an eternal truth. You’ll find most of them come on easy like fireflies hovering over a hayfield on a summer evening, just a small moment of light against the darkness.
I like to imagine you enjoying them in your favorite chair out on the porch with a glass of lemonade by your side, or cozy by the fire at the close of a winter day. And when you start to read the stories they are like Elmer Brandon’s pumpkin blossoms, one calls for another.
