Such is the satisfying sound when you sink your teeth into a firm, crisp, tasty apple. There are countless crackling crunches produced each year from the two billion bushels of apples grown worldwide, including about 200 million bushels in the United States.

Apples, like the first colonists, immigrated from Europe, and when the early settlers explored westward across the American continent, the apple went with them. The most famous apple planter of the early 1800's was John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, who conducted a one-man crusade to produce as many apple trees as possible. Also known as a missionary, he carried his Bible as well as seedlings and a sack of seeds on his travels through several eastern and midwestern states. Johnny Appleseed is reported to have planted hundreds of orchards in his lifetime while also preaching from the Bible to the early settlers and Indians.

What Johnny Appleseed was to the apple should be an example for the Christian today. At apparently great hardship, traveling mostly on foot with no shoes, he provided nutritious food for many people for generations to come. We too, as Christians, should thus carry with us the Good Seed, which is the Word of God, and plant it freely everywhere we go. "Brethren … we should bring forth fruit unto God" (Romans 7:4). Then souls will have something satisfying to sink their teeth into rather than the pithy, crunchless, empty things of the world.