Making bitter into sweet

What a day! The Jerusalem Center has students go through the experience of making olive oil. This has really been a special morning. Our Ancient Near East professor, Brother Seely (who happens to be a celebrity here--so funny), gave a wonderful mini devotional about olive trees and how they represent the Atonement. It really got me thinking. The Atonement was such a priceless, precious gift. It is really incomprehensible what our Redeemer went through, but the result is beautiful.  Olive oil has so many important uses, especially in ancient days or in the time of Jesus Christ. The process to make olive oil is worth studying, and it's so much harder than squeezing an olive between your fingers. On Thursday, we picked olives from the trees at the Center. They have to soak in a brine for a few days. Today we crushed them in a huge, rolling millstone to create a paste. The paste was put in baskets and placed in the press. Using levers and enormous rocks, the olives are pressed under immense pressure to get the oil out. I tasted an olive and some of the oil. That olive was the most bitter thing I've ever tasted in my life. Hours later, the taste still lingers in my mouth. I was amazed that such a bitter fruit could produces such an important, useful, good thing. It was so neat to compare this to the gift of the Atonement. "Oh, it is wonderful that he should care for me enough to die for me!"