There used to be a peach tree in my backyard. It was tall and thin but stately, and it had a crown of leaves and fruit that looked like something out of a movie. I had never seen such abundance on a plant that wasn’t specifically part of a public garden or conservatory, and yet here it was growing and thriving in my own backyard.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t always notice the peach tree. I admired it whenever I saw it, but I didn’t really pay attention to it until the day it snapped.

We’d had the peach tree for about three years before this happened. I was the one who found it fallen over in the yard last spring. In the weeks before, my dad often praised the tree and the fruit it was bearing—how beautiful and vivid the peaches were, how lush. He had plans for the peaches—use them in home-baked desserts, give them away to the neighbors, juice them, and so on, but he never started to harvest them. Instead, he—we—left the tree to keep flourishing and growing. Out of sight, out of mind until the next time we saw it. It became a cycle of awe, praise, planning, and forgetting, until that day in May when I walked past the window looking out into the backyard and saw a change in the landscape.

I hadn’t been in the back in a while because the weather had been rainy, so at first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. All I could tell was that something was different. It wasn’t until I actually went into the yard to look around that I was confronted with the body. Peaches were scattered across the concrete and in the flowerbeds. They lay in huge clumps still connected to their branches—great swaths of them, bright pink and orange and red, hidden underneath sprays of vivid green leaves. There was the peach tree, felled. Towards the base of the thin, green trunk the wood was snapped nearly clean in two, save for a few bits of bark connecting the stump to the fallen piece. I felt like I’d walked into a murder scene.

I remember standing there in the spring heat staring in disbelief. My first thought was How? How long had it been here like this? My next was When? When did this happen? I wondered wildly if maybe someone had cut it down: but who and why? I then thought it might’ve been the weather. It had been raining recently—maybe a rough wind had pushed down our little tree? But that seemed unlikely. Recent weather hadn’t been extreme enough to knock anything down.

And then it dawned on me: the peach tree hadn’t been cut or blown over; it had been heavy. It collapsed underneath its own weight.

Peaches were everywhere. I didn’t count them, but I’m sure there were nearly a hundred. I squatted down on the ground to gather them, and here and there I saw peaches that birds and insects had bitten into. I threw those into the flowerbeds to let the outside creatures keep snacking. The ones that weren’t bruised or open I saved. I told my dad what had happened, and together we washed the salvaged peaches in our sink and stored them in a bucket until we could figure out what to do with them. He cut the last lingering pieces of bark from the stump and composted the now peach-less branches.

When it was all done, I couldn’t stop thinking about why the peach tree had fallen. It sounded like a sermon in my head. I imagined my pastor from my childhood, a tall, loud man with a passionate, booming voice, saying, “See? The Lord will bless you. The Lord will bless you abundantly. But if you aren’t ready to receive that blessing? If you aren’t ready to hold the blessing He pours out before you? If you don’t harvest that blessing and pass it on as it comes to you? You may just collapse beneath the weight of His goodness. If you’re not ready to receive it, you may not be able to hold it for long, and then those gifts and all that blessing may go to waste.”

I’m sure there are blessings you’re waiting for. I know I am. But since the peach tree, I’ve often thought about what it would be like if I immediately got those blessings I so desperately pray for. Would I be ready for them? Would I be able to hold, appreciate, and use them? Or would I break beneath the weight of an answered prayer? Would I squander goodness that I didn’t know how to hold?

The word from the peach tree is that blessing is blessing, but we are not always ready to receive. I think this is why God has His time and we have ours. A premature blessing may as well be a loss, so He asks us to wait. We must trust that if it’s not here yet, we aren’t ready, and when it comes—we are.

When have you been reminded of God’s perfect timing—has there been a peach tree in your life?