Taste for Faith

One day in early December a few years back, I placed, like a gauntlet, a jar of honey in the center of my apartment. It was a big jar in a small space, which left me no choice anymore but to stop ignoring it. This was my goal, for two reasons:

• first, a handful of weeks earlier, one of my favorite Bible scholars had preached a sermon that was leaving a sour taste in my mouth;
• and second, things in general were not going well.

In his sermon, the scholar had emphasized Old Testament verses that describe God in sensory language. He had pointed out the way those verses evoke sight, touch, and sound: God is a rock, a shepherd, and a flame, his name is a tower, and he is in a whisper . For good measure, the scholar had offered several more examples, but then he had centered on a particular one. It was a familiar metaphor, yet that day it became also new—it became what irritated and drove me for weeks and months afterward.

God is sweet, the scholar said. His ways taste sweeter than honey.

Sweeter than honey. Such poetry! And oh, the thought! Part of me wanted to believe it wholly, with conviction, especially on account that it was biblical. There was a hitch, however: much of me wasn’t sure I was willing to buy the idea.

It was the dead of Michigan winter. I was in debt and strapped for cash. There was the distinct possibility that my career was going nowhere. I was single, single—despite being enamored by all things romance, in all my life I hadn’t been asked out on one bona fide date—and I was drowning in summer wedding invitations, including one each for all three of my siblings. I had been lately rejected by a guy whom I liked a lot. Whom I had practically thrown myself at weeks earlier, which made the situation additionally awkward. I was anxious and bored and jealous and disillusioned and embarrassed by my life. It had been that way for a long time. But the deep and real problem, the one running down the middle of everything else—I could see it, suddenly—was that God seemed anything but sweet.

I had been believing in God, trusting him, looking to him, obeying him, and trying to follow him, all for as long as I could remember. It seemed I had more than enough Sunday School attendance records, good girl habits, and even earnest chastity to prove—well, something. Shouldn’t faithfulness like that make a difference? If God loved me, wouldn’t he reward my good behavior, at least a little? Wouldn’t he supply even a hint of the blessings I kept asking him for? But he wasn’t and he hadn’t, and I didn’t know what to do about that.

So I decided to do the sort of thing I had always seemed excellent at doing: something faithful. I took the honey/sensory metaphor idea to heart, and I decided to fast from sweets. Six months without processed sugar was what I set out to accomplish—I didn’t expect that anything major would change as a result, but I figured that at least some spiritual discipline might make me feel better. In the past, things had more or less seemed to work out that way.

I was about to quickly discover: Not this time.

(To be continued in an upcoming post. Thanks for your patience!)

Lisa’s note: Last time I promised that, as a way of introducing Craving Grace, my next blog would be about my hairstylist. In working to follow through on that, I found that a couple other pieces probably needed to be explained before the stylist part would make sense. So, with apologies, I’ve begun with the beginning and am going to work from there. Down the road, feel free to let me know if you think I’m forgetting about this.