Forbidden Fruit

Bite into that forbidden fruit, its scent so alluring and strong. I won’t be your tyrranical God, leaving you in the arms of Temptation and asking you not to embrace her. Thorns in that fruit, but the juice that ruptures from its smooth skin is so sweet and quenching that you barely feel the pain as its shards bore into your tongue. The pain will come later. The pleasure is all now. I saw you gazing at it with longing for weeks, as it swung back and forth among the leaves. One day, you dared to touch it, felt its presence in your hand, its weight as it dropped from the branch you plucked it from. I saw you sleep with it by your side, hold it up to your nose and inhale that irresistible aroma with desire. And your mouth would water, so you licked it, thinking that would arrest this infatuation, satisfy you. But the longing only grew. You wish you could say you tried turning to God for salvation from sin, but you didn’t. How could this beauty, this perfection, be anything other than divinely sanctioned? Still, you hesitated. To bite it would mar its surface. To consume it would mean to be left with nothing. I told you to kiss that forbidden fruit because to understand the Gospel you must experience sin for yourself. And so now you are haunted by dreams of the juice trickling down your throat, of its flesh between your lips. It will never be yours again. But how you relish that it once was! You walk past the tree of temptation everyday now, but no other fruit ignites you with desire. You think of yours, and taste the scars it left in your mouth.