Summer pudding church

I had this great idea about growing our own summer pudding: okay, not the bread or sugar but all the fruit for it.
So now we've got blackcurrants, redcurrants and whitecurrants in the veg bed, blueberries in pots covered in netting, raspberry canes which seem to be marching across the garden, an official blackberry (thornless) winding its way along a wire support and a (much tastier) thorny one escaping from behind a neighbour's shed. There are cultivated strawberries in window boxes and tiny wild strawberries in a raised bed. There's even a new variety - the wonderberry, a cross between gooseberries and blackcurrants - shouldering out all the other varieties.
Guaranteed perfect summer pudding ingredients, you might think.
Except.
Except that they don't all ripen at the same time or perform as intended.
So the blackcurrants are finishing while the reds and whites are still teeth-achingly sour.
The thorny blackberries are green and hard, and the thornless one's heavily-fruiting branches are turning brown and dying.
The marching raspberry canes are sturdy and healthy-looking but have hardly produced a single flower.
The strawberries get eaten as soon as they appear, either by visiting children, snails, birds or us, so don't hang around long enough to go into pudding.
The wild strawberries are growing prolifically but you need about thirty for a mouthful and they don't seem to taste of anything.
The wonderberries are producing a multitude of flowers but haven't so far got around to converting them into anything with a food value.
And the blueberries got invaded yesterday by a blackbird who was very thin when he got in through the birdproof netting and very fat when he got liberated, reluctantly, by my husband.
So what has this got to do with church?
Well, ours seems to have all the ingredients for a God-worshipping, neighbour-loving, life-affirming community - potentially the perfect summer-pudding church.
Except.
Except that some of its people-ingredients are ripe for action - evangelism, mission, social action projects, out-there and up-there worship - and want it all happening right now and will go into brown-squishy-mould format if made to wait till all the other fruit is ripe.
At the same time, others are flowering but still maturing, pondering on God and waiting for the right time to produce their crop, and knowing it can't be hurried.
Others are letting their fruit get scavenged, filling gaps on demand and not saving anything for sharing in the longer-term.
Others are eaten up with impatience with those varieties whose fruit doesn't seem to complement their own, who don't produce the required results on time or who are invading their territory.
Still others are trying to hold on to an earlier time in their development and not move on to the next stage of growth.
And others are prematurely losing their zest and, just at the time when their crops are ripe for harvesting, are fading out of the garden's life.
So what do you do with the summer pudding church?
Persevere with the ideal of all these ingredients blending harmoniously into one fantastic dessert, ripe or unripe?
Treat them all as separate fruits, each delicious in their own right, but too hard to try and combine?
Compromise - use some together, some separately, and cut your losses on the ones that miss the moment?
I'm glad it's God's problem, not mine. He's the only one who can possibly make it work out, and the decision of how to treat all these amazing ingredients and combine them into something greater than their individual flavours, has to remain in his hands.
I'm also glad that his ways are not like ours.
Otherwise he'd do with us what we've done with the fruit in the garden, which is to cut down the fruiting but dying blackberry in its prime, before it spreads its discouragement to the surrounding plants; to eat the sparse raspberries as and when they appear; to give up on the strawberries, both cultivated and wild; to tighten the netting around the blueberries while consigning the outside branches to scavenging birds; to freeze the blackcurrants till the reds and whites are ready to join them, and to make a note not to grow wonderberries so close to the others again, and not at all if they don't produce fruit by the end of summertime.
We might still get a pudding at the end of this season. But a lot of my plans are going to end up as compost. And I don't want that happening to my life, or to our church.
So I'm more than happy that God knows the plans he has for us, plans for our fruitfulness and not for chucking on the compost, and I'll go along with whatever he has in mind.