See the above picture? Grapefruit are rare here, and I have a grapefruit tree sheltering the picture window in my bedroom. I never know each year if there will be fruit. I took that photo almost exactly a year ago. Today there’s zero fruit on the tree. We had a longer very intense rainy season and I believe that’s why we’re fruitless this year on the tree.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about growing citrus. My expertise was in apples and grapes from my thirty years in Virginia.

I learned many years ago in Virginia when I planted an assortment of grapevines in my yard that the weather has to cooperate to get grapes. A wet spring followed by a hot dry summer seemed to be what our grapes preferred. Too much water in the summer and you ended up with watery tasteless grapes unfit for jelly or juice.

Someone was asking yesterday what I thought about the new Asbury Revival. If you’re not acquainted with Asbury or the revival that happened there in 1970 it’s a small college in Wilmore, Kentucky. Supposedly it has been swept with revivals off and on for many years now. One appears to be happening now.

The author of the article I have linked to thinks it’s more of an awakening than a revival. Whatever, in my eyes after so many long years at ‘revival’ churches and on worship teams I’ve come to view revival differently. It does not help that my husband is attending a church that bills itself as a ‘Megachurch and revival in the jungle!‘ instead of what it actually is, a place filled with hurt people who seem to hurt others in their day to day lives.

It’s a lot like those grapes in the bad years. You start with expectation and excitement and end up with something not worth the effort to harvest it. I’ve lived through some major revivals, Brownsville Revival, the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Revival and a spate of others. I went to Randy Clark’s church in Harrisburg, Pa. every single time “Voice of the Apostles” conferences happened, or Bethel Redding held a conference. Drove up to the Foursquare church in rural Maryland for conferences and revivals or down to Virginia Beach.

It was exhausting. Just like trying to make good fruit from bad.

So here on the other side, post deconstruction and reconstruction of belief, I see many of these revivals as running the gamut from harmful to harmless. Harmless was the fun we had, the laughter, the fire tunnels, the worship. Everyone has deep needs for connection, for times of refreshing. I can see now how there were many things about the revivals that met those kinds of needs, albeit in a quite financially expensive way.

The harmful. I have seen church splits come out of these things, when absolutists drinking whatever flavor dished out at different revivals tried to force those changes on the church instead of understanding that church really needs to be a tent big enough to accept everyone. So many youth I know have fled the church because of the madness many had been drug through under the guise of revival, the conflicting teachings, and the lack of all personal responsibility by many adults enmeshed.

Just like my grapes and now my grapefruit tree I have learned to judge a place by the fruits. If the fruits don’t exist, or they are things like division, gossip, hate and pride. Places with about as many fruits as my grapefruit tree holds at this moment – run, don’t walk away!

Particularly if you see no humility, humbleness or love. Revival isn’t about us, it’s not to somehow make us feel better, or focused on us. It’s the greater good, reforming the world into that which more closely aligns with that of Jesus. Make earth as it is in heaven.

If it spring boards into things like Jesus said believers should do in the Bible, like feeding others, visiting widows and orphans and a million other things that spring from caring for others then that revival is genuine. There be fruits!

So many in religion do not understand that the reason teenagers and young adult run the heck away from religion has to do with the utter hypocrisy of what we say we believe and what we do. Simple. Fruitlessness with a side order toxic blame and shame.

Stop it!