You know how it is, you don’t notice something that you drive by every day until something actually makes you stop and take full notice of it. So it was with our peach trees in our little orchard alongside the lane. We were so excited this spring when we saw the starts of peaches on both of the peach trees. We’ve only ever had a total of three peaches on the trees before and so this was reason to celebrate and cheer for sure. But then we got busy and we stopped noticing the peach trees when we would come or go from the farm (mainly we were just watching out for the extended family of Canadian Geese that have taken up residence near the pond).

Until we noticed.

The second tree had smaller peaches than the first, but it had zillions of them. Zillions might be an exaggeration but coming from none last year, abundant peaches sure looked like zillions. And while a zillion peaches sounds delish (cobber, jam, with yogurt, did I mention cobbler?) there were so many peaches that despite being half sized, they were weighing down the branches something terrible. Which is exactly what we now noticed.

So today we headed out to harvest our first ever peach crop, only the peaches weren’t quite ripe enough. We feared they would break the branches if we left them on any longer, so our happy harvest was not nearly so exciting when you realize that we just dumped a zillion half-sized peaches in the woods for all the local critters to enjoy instead of having cobbler tonight. Sigh. Next year, I promised the tree, we will thin out the blossoms long before they become heavy fruit.

To everyone who knows us, James and I are an SOS flag waving in the wind. The words “Stage 4” are all anyone needs to hear before they immediately offer help, support, encouragement – absolutely anything at all. We have an army of friends, family and strangers praying for us, and we know we could have a crew here in an instant if we needed help with anything at all.

But it occurred to me today, while up on a ladder, picking peaches and tossing them in the bucket, that most of the time when we need help in our lives, it isn’t obvious. There isn’t some two-word code phrase that people easily say when they need or want help, unfortunately. People ask, “How are you?” and we say, “Fine,” even when we are very far from it. We all might have an army of support willing to help at any moment, but as far as anyone can tell, we are doing great, we are feeling good and our lives are full of blessings.

So was our peach tree. It was blessed with fruit and we were excited and we celebrated but we didn’t notice until it was literally weighed down from the effort of all that work that we realized it needed help. And it needed a whole bucket full of help! I suspect that many times when we say we are fine we are very much not fine but we don’t know how to say so, or we feel like it speaks badly of us if we can’t just handle it all on our own.

People have said to me recently, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” It’s not my favorite thought, certainly not right now it isn’t, but today, I changed my thinking about that phrase by just tweaking it slightly. Perhaps, in that phrase, the word “you” is meant to be plural. Maybe God doesn’t give us – the collective us – more than we can handle. Collectively handle. I don’t know that James and I could handle all that we have on our plates right now alone. But we don’t have to. And I know our little peach tree couldn’t have handled that load much longer without great injury to branch or trunk. It needed help. It just couldn’t ask for it.

I hope that little tree always serves as a reminder to me to notice the people in my life who have SOS flags waving, and to do whatever I can to lend a hand. But I hope even more so, that it reminds me of all the people around me, people I know and people I don’t know yet- that need my help but who can’t ask for it for whatever reason. Maybe it just looks like their life is full of sweet blessings. Maybe I need to really see it for what it is and realize they are weighed down with burdens and to provide support in whatever manner they need most. Maybe I need to wait a beat after they say, “Fine,” to be certain that’s really how they feel.

I am not blessed with a belly full of cobbler tonight, but I think my heart was blessed with a lesson I needed to learn. God doesn’t give any of us more than we can handle – with His help and those who share their love with us, whether we are able to ask for it or not.