I find that people want to experience life from afar or vicariously through someone else. If there is a peculiar food item at the dinner table, we would rather someone else take one for the team and tell us their experience.
If we have dreams of becoming affluent writers, we find refuge and our own demise in other people’s books, their dreams. Musicians hide behind glorifying other people's music forgetting to create their own. We get comfortable with the 8-5 job that we do not hate, but we do not love.
People would rather hear of experience instead of experience it on their own especially when it is unpredictable and unknown.
My husband and I have been on a journey of self-actualization, figuring out who we are, who are we committed to be to God, others, and our ourselves.
We hear about a God of miracles, silence, blessing, lack, that is personal or distant.
Everyone’s experience of God, this force of love that keeps our world in motion, will be different, but we cannot taste what we have never pursued to taste, and we will not see what we have never ventured to see.
As I am getting older, and the theological debates ping pong back in forth in my brain, I am finding myself jaded and missing the main point, the good part. I find myself resonating with Martha, feeling like I am doing everything myself and Jesus is sitting back watching. Instead of tasting and seeing God’s goodness by actually getting close to Jesus, His love, I venture away from the source of love in this world and root my focus in the negative, the unknown, the theological angst. No wonder I find myself tired, negative, and unmotivated.
I have given myself permission to dismiss myself from the theological ping pong game especially when it gets disorienting and deflating. I encourage you to do the same. I am choosing to reclaim simplicity. I am making conscientious decisions to choose to be a Mary and simply sit at the feet of Jesus once again, picking the good part of my day. Tasting and seeing God takes slowing down and making it personal. Our way of connecting with God was never meant to look like anyone else.
Taste and see God - in your own way.
Let’s stop living life so safe, because at the end of the day, when we are living a life that does not make us happy, we are left with an emptiness and sadness because we did not take risks to taste the goodness, beauty, and wonder of life ourselves. You will always miss the shots you never take in life.
God is closer to us than we realize. He is here, and He is now. Taste and see that He is good, and find refuge in Him.
“O taste and see that the Lord [our God] is good;
How blessed [fortunate, prosperous, and favored by God] is the man who takes refuge in Him.”