Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

Psalm 34:8

Recently, in an effort to be more organized, I went through a large stack of cooking magazines. I glanced at the recipes and, if they looked good to me, I tore out the pages and filed them in a recipe binder. I threw away more recipes than I collected, but still I had more than I would probably ever make.

Recipes are good to have and fun to peruse but looking at them doesn’t tell the story. The story comes in the tasting. In order to taste them, I have to make them.

This means a trip to the grocery store and time to prepare the food. Nothing overwhelming about that at all, but just saying . . . reading about a recipe and tasting the outcome are two different things.

This verse leads me to think that there is more to our relationship with God than simply reading the Bible, though that is a great beginning. But if our relationship ends there, we have missed tasting and seeing that He is good. At some point, we have to internalize what the Bible says. We need to meditate on His word, let the words soak deep into our hearts and allow the words He wrote to replace the words others, including ourselves, have written in our hearts about Him and us.

God gets a fair amount of bad press. If we based our opinion of God on what others say about Him, we might not decide He is all that good. He gets blamed for sickness and death, floods and famine. Even fair-minded individuals may say things like, “Well, God allowed me to be sick, allowed my child to die, allowed my finances to be in the toilet, etc.—to teach me something.”

It becomes all too easy to think God is good sometimes, and maybe only good to certain people. But to believe He is good all the time, even when bad things happen, well, that’s often difficult. Years of tasting God through His Word, through His faithfulness, through His continual presence in my life, have helped me to see that He is indeed good. I didn’t come to that conclusion after one pass through the Bible. I came by this revelation the hard way, through years of seeking and searching and, dare I say, tasting.

I don’t always get my prayers answered the way I think they should be. I was in constant physical pain for over 22 years and believed for my healing all that time and, I will be honest, often wondered if God really is good. If He was really good, why was I still in pain?

But the more time I spend in His Word and in fellowship with other believers, the more convinced I am that He is indeed, good whether I am healed or not. He has healed me of fibromyalgia, but I am still waiting on healing from arthritis. Why one and not the other I don’t know, but this I do know—God is good all the time!

Forgive me, Father, for the times when I have doubted Your goodness. Forgive me for questioning Your goodness when my prayers did not get answered the way I wanted. I know You are a good God and a gracious, loving Father. Thank You for not giving up on me and for not turning away from me. Help me to come to You, to feed on Your Word, to seek Your presence, Your peace and Your goodness, especially when I don’t feel like doing so. May I come to know as did this psalmist that I am blessed when I take refuge in You, in Jesus’s name amen. 

I would love to hear from you. Please let me know if I can be praying for you as well.

pic credit:kalynbrooke.com