Ripe for Repentance

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We tend to think that when something is ripe, it is ready. As I cut up a melon last night and realized it was harder than it should be, I decided that I preferred that to a spoiled one. However, when we look at the scriptures, the word ripe, while meaning ready, doesn’t always mean a good thing. In fact, ripening is a more complicated process than we think. In the biological field, it’s called veraison, in which the fruit weakens and is no longer fed by the plant to which it is attached. At that point, the plant leaves it on its own to start a new life.

When we are born into this world, we are that fruit. We have been left on our own to start a new life, one that either withers away on the vine or produces fruit in and of itself, after its own kind. We were considered ready by our Creator, by our mother’s womb, and later by society to become adults in our own life and replenish that which we obtained towards the perpetuation of life.

After Christ called them to follow Him, the Disciples we read ‘straightway left their nets’ because they realized the need and the way for repentance. Many people do not think they need to repent. They see nothing wrong with their actions. Others, like the Pharisees, think that they must first be clean before they can approach Christ, and yet the widow and the lepers and others show us that when the unclean come to Christ He will heal them.

We are ripe in iniquity, but that doesn’t mean we are ready to commit more sin. Being ripe in iniquity means we are ripe for repentance. Iniquity means an inequity with the requirements of deity. Repentance is how we make it right. In essence, we don’t actually DO anything. We turn to Christ, and His grace is sufficient for the meek, and with His stripes we are healed.

Perhaps this is one reason I keep my Saturn because I feel it to be an extension of my soul. It is beaten up, repaired, realigned, and repeatedly maintained to keep it in the right way. After all of that, it is acceptable to me. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with that, but it continues to serve me, and so I keep it. A friend of mine at church said this, which I found profound. He said that the Savior came, not for “IF” we sin, but for when. The atonement is for when we sin. There was never a question of if. The question has always been to bring imperfect beings back into his presence.

Most of the analogies I know for repentance involve farming. Neil Maxwell used to say that when we are ready to plant, God will stop plowing. The events of our lives exist to make us ripe for repentance. They give us opportunities to realize our need for a Savior and turn to Him. They are there to pick at us until we realize that we are unclean no matter what we do, that it will never be good enough, so stop trying to be good enough. When they were stung by poisonous serpents in Sinai, the children of Israel had but to look at a brass serpent atop Moses’ rod, but too many of them insisted on finding a cure and died. The test of life is not to be the best but to realize our nothingness and turn to Christ when we are ripe, in whom and through whom we can inherit all the Father hath.