Spiritual Fruit: being ripe, tasty and at our best

It's been a while since I've posted and a lot has happened, including accepting a call to a new church effective November 1. I've also had the pleasure of serving part time as a chaplain for the Ministry to Seafarers at the Port of Montreal and with everything going on, I began to think a lot about how important our character is, who we are inside, in being a follower of Jesus. During my time as a chaplain at the port, we as staff spent time this past winter and spring talking about being shaped by the Holy Spirit into the people God has created us to be. We focused a lot on character because ministry is as much about who we are as it is about what we do.
Paul's image of the Holy Spirit's influence on us as being like ripe mature fruit really struck me, especially now with it being harvest time. I bought an avocado yesterday that was not quite ripe and it was rather tasteless, while last week we had bananas that became over ripe, and while you could still use  them in banana bread, they were rather unappealing to look at and kind of gross to handle because they were so mushy, and then there were those bothersome fruit flies that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I began to think that Paul was rather clever in comparing our spiritual life in the Holy Spirit to being like fruit; we can be ripe, tasty, and at our best when we focus on developing the various aspects of being fruity in the Spirit, or we can be tasteless or bitter because we're unripe, or rather mushy and gross if we become overly ripe; either way we become very unappealing to the world around us, making it much more difficult for the people in our lives to see and know God's grace and the love of Jesus for them.
So over the next while, I hope to do some reflecting on what Paul describes as the Fruit of the Spirit and invite you to join me in that reflecting. I thank the other members of the Ministry to Seafarers and I'm sure you'll see some of your thoughts and words here over the next while as I've learned much from you on how to be ripe fruit in the Spirit: Thanks!