Taste and See

My Aunt Bill's Brown Candy never looked this good.

If your last two weeks have been like mine, there has been a plethora of extra foods, snacks, holiday dinners, buffets and party menus.  There has been an over abundance of calories abounding down the gullet and now hanging around my mid-section.  Bottom line...there has been just too much food.  The family favorite treats like Aunt Bill's Brown Candy have made their annual appearance.  For me, at this time of year, just seeing and smelling is not good enough.  I need at least one bite, I have to taste it....all.  


It was really easy for me to see God's point when I came across this memory verse.  As the events of this year are going through the freeze frame of my brain, I now have a new perspective on what it means.     

Taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Ps. 34:8

I love the reassurance the second half of this text gives.  Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.  I believe that God has my back.  Yes, He does....every time.  But what I have been drawn into and deeply absorbed in is the "taste and see" part.  There are some life lessons that will only be taught by God in life's school of adversity.  How are we going to know what kind of refuge God has or how he has our back unless we are faced with situations that require Him to rock his strong refuge-type skills?  In other words, we don't seek shelter in God when things are going our way.  We normally go running to God only when we are in deep trouble, we need answers, need direction, want an elusive burning bush or have no one to turn to.    


We won't see God be God until we are served a plate of hard circumstances in which we have to experience God be God.  And every time... as I taste and see God's heaping portions of adversity ...I know that God is good.  You see...in the good times we experience God's goodness.  But I have found that the Lord is good in tough circumstances, in the cancer sentences, in my all-too-mixed up chaos right now.  In the dark times, where there seems no hope, God is good.  It's in the middle of the rough and tough stuff of this life that we must taste and see God's goodness, and where I will experience God's good character.  Taste and see....  


It's in those cataclysmic collisions, those places of grace that I taste God's goodness.  These are the times when trust trumps understanding and keeps me clinging.  Where belief overcomes doubt and I see God for who He says he is.  It's in those holy moments where God whispers "this is no sweat, I've got this" as He breathes peace over chaos.  Fervent prayers resurrect hope.  He's  in those dark days of the slow inch-forward through the endless maze of medical tests.  It's here that I can taste the goodness of God.  It's in the encounters of His love that is shown to the unloved, the forgotten, the vulnerable, the orphaned and the shunned.  In the compassion puddles that I see God, I taste His goodness, and find refuge.  It's there at His dinner table of full of surrender.  Believe me...I've tasted, and man...it's mmmmmm...good.    


How have you tasted the Lord's goodness?