Picking Raspberries

These last ten days I've spent a lot of time in the raspberry patch, alone with my thoughts and not so alone with the bugs and spiders. Somedays the picking has taken two hours and on Monday's after having not picked on Sunday, I find the longest days out there. So here is what I've learned/observed.
One particularly windy evening of rain and thunderstorms, we had what the news labeled 80 mph shear winds. I've heard the term before when they refer to a shear wind in an airplane crash. So the next morning on my picking, I find that some of the canes were laid right over onto the nearby canes while others didn't seem affected at all. So I began relating this to the gospel. Here I have some canes that are ramrod straight and next to them a new cane has grown. Literally up the side of the ramrod straight cane with very little variance. Some canes are twisted and growing every which way within the patch. And others yet, lean against their neighbors. (Can you figure where this is going? It's so obvious, isn't it?)
Isn't that a true parable for a testimony? We are either like the cane that follows the straight and narrow way, very narrow in my patch because it is so crowded, or we lean on others' testimonies or we struggle to find our way, similar to not holding to the iron rod. Before the wind that night, my canes that were laid over in the wind had been standing straight. We can liken this to temptation or the world pulling us ever so slightly away from the gospel. In their case, though it wasn't a slow process, it was BAM!!