Instead of a birthday cake, when I was a kid I had a blackberry cobbler and ice cream for my birthday in July. We always picked blackberries in June and early July.
Our family watched the blackberry vines closely on our trips to the farm, till just the right time to pick the berries. Grasping the wire handles of our gallon lard buckets, we spread out over the field to pick, all of us kids under Mama’s watchful eyes. Blackberry vines are covered with stickers and the best berries are hidden under the green foliage, so you must work for them.
Picking blackberries was a whole family project, including aunts and uncles. Sometimes we picked berries along the country roads, in the ditches, and open fields belonging to distant relatives. Frequently we picked plums and persimmons too.
A couple of years we sold some of our blackberries to Dairy Queen and Mama returned some of the money to us kids, which we used to buy blackberry milkshakes at the Dairy Queen. I have laughed at the irony of that over the years, but somehow just putting our berries in ice cream was not the same as a Dairy Queen milkshake.
Occasionally while we were picking blackberries we might see a garden snake, on a very rare occasion, some poisonous snake, but a bunch of kids stomping around, yelling, and having fun runs off snakes. The worst danger when picking blackberries is chiggers, tiny red mites that love to burrow into the skin, producing an itchy allergic reaction.
Satan lurks around us like a garden snake, a poisonous snake, or a chigger. If he can’t get to you one way, he will find another way to attack you. He is like a sneaky thief always on the lookout for some way to torment you.
Jesus said this in John 10:10 nkjv “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”
Jesus’ life in the Spirit is the abundant life, which surely includes blackberry cobbler and ice cream.