Read Leaping Off the Page: Any Time of the Year Edition Page 7
Yikes! All Those Fruits!
A Short Play
SCENE: Can take place just about anywhere, so have fun coming up with your own scenario.
PROPS: Primarily a big hat bedecked with fruit. The fruits are listed at the end.
CAST:
Pastor: A man or woman who has been preaching on the fruit of the Spirit.
Carmen: A member of the congregation who is trying, really trying, to do it right.
Pastor: Carmen, how nice of you to pop in and see us!
Carmen: Well, Pastor, I just don’t know what to do with myself.
Pastor: How can I help?
Carmen: You’ve been preaching about the fruits of the Spirit, and it’s all weighing me down something fierce. (Indicates her hat, which, if this piece goes the way I think it’s going to go, will be a true work of art and pretty much impossible to pull off. )
Pastor: (Eyeing the hat) What seems to be the problem?
Carmen: It’s all so impossible!
Pastor: How so?
Carmen: Take kindness. You preached on that last week, and I was so inspired, I really was.
Pastor: (Smiles) Thank you.
Carmen: (Growls) It’s so hard! I was determined to be kind every single day. Like the Boy Scouts, you know?
Pastor: One good deed a day?
Carmen: Exactly!
Pastor: How’d it go!
Carmen: It was a disaster!
Pastor: (Startled) A disaster?
Carmen: Nothing but. (Removes pineapple from hat. Told you it’d be difficult) It’s like this pineapple.
Pastor: (Nods wisely) A pineapple.
Carmen: All woody and prickly.
Pastor: I’m listening.
Carmen: Take Thursday, for instance.
Pastor: All right.
Carmen: I went to the mall. Had to get my roots touched up.
Pastor: I see. (Beat) I think.
Carmen: So I see this little old lady wanting to cross the street.
Pastor: Classic Boy Scout good deed.
Carmen: That’s what I thought!
Pastor: Well, it is a kind deed…
Carmen: It was a disaster!
Pastor: Hmmm. I believe you mentioned that.
Carmen: I took her arm, waited for the light, and started across with her. Man! She was slow. The light changed before we were even half way across, and I had to wave at the cars to make them stop.
Pastor: But you did get across okay?
Carmen: Eventually.
Pastor: So that was good, right?
Carmen: Wrong!
Pastor: Wrong?
Carmen: Wrong.
Pastor: (Pause) I’m still listening.
Carmen: She didn’t want to go to the mall.
Pastor: Oh.
Carmen: She was waiting on that corner for her daughter-in-law who was going to pick her up and take her out to lunch. They ended up missing each other, missed lunch, and now the daughter-in-law isn’t talking to her. Again.
Pastor: How do you know all this?
Carmen: What else could I do? I took the old lady to lunch, of course. Figured my roots could wait. She told me all about that. How the two had been estranged, and that lunch engagement was an attempt to patch things up. I’ve got her in the car now. We’ll be going to see the daughter-in-law after I’m through here so I can apologize, and hopefully things will be fine.
Pastor: That’s kind of you.
Carmen: (Shrugs) What else could I do? (Sighs, pushing the pineapple away) Woody and prickly.
Pastor: Anything else?
Carmen: (Takes coconut off her hat.) Longsuffering. Didn’t you say in that sermon last month that it’s something like patience? Patience! Man, it’s a hard one to crack! I work and I work on it…
Pastor: (Takes coconut, hefts it) I can see that it’d be tough.
Carmen: (A bunch of grapes with most of the grapes gone) Self-control. It seems like it’s the little things that get me on that one.
Pastor: Where’d all the grapes go?
Carmen: (Stares at the bunch) I ate them. Of course.
Pastor: (Nods) Of course.
Carmen: (Pomegranate) Goodness. Now that one really gets messy.
Pastor: How so?
Carmen: How can you define it? What is goodness, anyway? I simply don’t know how to measure it.
Pastor: (Lifting hat off her head) Is that what the rest of this? (Examines apple)
Carmen: Faithfulness. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And all that.
Pastor: And all that. (Holds up a banana.)
Carmen: Gentleness. Bruises easily.
Pastor: (Peach. Looks inquiringly)
Carmen: Oh that. Peace. It’s still green. Too hard and not much flavor.
Pastor: Yet.
Carmen: Yet.
Pastor: (Broccoli) This isn’t a fruit.
Carmen: No. It’s a super-food. Full of vitamins and minerals and fiber. It even has protein! Everything necessary for life.
Pastor: Let me guess. This is love.
Carmen: Yeah.
Pastor: That appears to be it. You only have eight here. Where’s your joy?
Carmen: Oh, right. (Digs in purse and produces a baggy with a squashed tomato)
Pastor: (Taking it and examining it) This is your joy?
Carmen: (Nodding) I can’t keep it together. It just rolls away from me and gets squashed.
Pastor: (Takes the hat and all the fruit and puts it on a table behind him.) I can see why.
Carmen: (Startled) You can?
Pastor: And I apologize. I’ve been preaching about the fruit of the Spirit, focusing on a different one each week.
Carmen: Yes. And I’ve been getting it.
Pastor: Well, I haven’t.
Carmen: Huh?
Pastor: Each week I preached on a distinct fruit. But they’re not. Or rather, it isn’t. Paul talked about the fruit, not fruits.
Carmen: Well, of course, we all know that.
Pastor: Forget that fruit basket. It’s irrelevant.
Carmen: It is?
Pastor: You, my dear Carmen, are the fruit.
Carmen: Me?
Pastor: Yes, you. The Spirit is working in you and you are the fruit.
Carmen: But it’s such hard work!
Pastor: Stop working on it.
Carmen: Stop?
Pastor: Relax in the Lord and trust Him to make it work.
Carmen: Relax…
Pastor: Now, go out to that new friend of yours in the car and be. That’s all. Just be.
Carmen: Thank you, Pastor. Just be. The Spirit will nurture the rest in me.
Pastor: And you will embody it.
(Carmen exits and the Pastor takes a bite of apple.)