Let me start by affirming:  I LOVE MY SMALL GROUP!

There, I got that out of my system.

Our small group meets Wednesday nights.  We set up a couple of tables in the sanctuary and eat, pray and love.  No, really.  We eat for the first half hour, then we have a lesson, and then a little break to refill our beverages and eat more dessert and then we share prayer needs.  Last night our lesson was on Jonah and submitting to God’s plan for our life and ministry.  We had a great lesson.  It seems we all sometimes try and runaway from Jesus.  Our food thing was “Stuff on a Stick.”  Each week the theme changes.  A couple of people brought some of the most delicious meat kabobs I’ve ever had, then there were cookies on sticks, appetizer wieners on toothpicks, and someone else brought fried shrimp.  I asked about the stick, and they said “the tail is God’s stick.”  I’m not buying it,  but they were yum.  Another couple brought tater tots on toothpicks and someone else stuck chicken nuggets and pizza pockets on a skewer.  The kids (most of us have our children running around) loved it!

We were in a dilemma because just two weeks ago I brought teriyaki salmon on a skewer, so I didn’t know what to bring.  Mrs. Greenbean suggested we kabob fruit.  So, that is what we did.

All the fruit was fresh and we cut and sliced it at home.  I bought oranges, large strawberries, grapes, cantaloupe and pineapple.  The Albertsons I shopped at didn’t have any regular fresh pineapple.  All they had was “organic.”  I learned that organic means small and expensive.  They were the tiniest pineapples I’d ever seen.  I think they must have been raised on an island in the Pacific where everything is miniature.

Mrs. Greenbean was the brains behind the arrangement.  I wanted to just stick it all on there haphazard but she insisted on order.  So we put an orange half (she insisted on halving them, and she was right) then a grape, cantaloupe, grape, strawberry, grape, pineapple, grape, orange half, and then a big marshmallow!  I know that marshmallow is not a fruit, but whenever I make fruit salad I always put miniature (from that same island in the Pacific) marshmallows in it, so the marshmallow made sense.  Besides, the marshmallow made the sharp end of the skewer safer.

I’d never made fruit kabobs before, but this will not be my last.  It made me yearn for summer.  Had it been summer, I think I could have put watermelon on it and even mango.  We thought about bananas, but were worried they would turn brown and I didn’t want to taint the freshness of it with lemon juice.  If we’d wanted a sweeter approach we could have drizzled chocolate sauce or caramel on top or even a jam based or honey sauce over it and then sprinkled with powdered sugar.

I love my small group.