taste and see

The other night I scanned through my entire blog archive, pulling a few articles here or there for potential use in a future project, and it was fascinating to see how much I have changed as a person and a writer and a student of the Bible over the last 7.5 years and 200+ blog posts. I started out a little naive, a little too sure, and twenty-two years old—a fresh-faced newlywed with no children, yet to experience profound loss, betrayal, despair, or sacrifice.

I am grateful that God does not give us a preview of our lives.

But being able to look back now, as I sit here 7+ years older, family expanded to four, and permanently altered by simply having survived the year 2018 (and its repercussions), I can see now the blessings He is crafting out of the pain.

There is softness in me where I once had only hard edges. There are questions where I once had too many arrogant answers. There’s prayer and surrender and release of control in some of the places I used to grip with white knuckles; there is color—not mere shades of gray, but brilliant, living color—in areas I could only ever see in black and white before.

And He has done it all so graciously, so gradually, that even though I look back from here and the difference is stark, I felt His shaping work as only the gentlest of touches in the interim.

Last week while I was standing in the customer service line at Costco was the first time in my memory that I ever desired, from a true joy and delight unadulterated by guilt, to talk about Jesus with total strangers. I have known the Gospel for my entire life, but only in the last few weeks has it become Good News to me—that my King has come, that He has conquered sin and death, and that He has set free those captive and oppressed into jubilee.

And that I, even I, count as one of the freed: Freed from the condemnation of self-righteous men, like the adulteress; freed from the invisibility of being female, like the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears; freed from the deep pain of being unloved and uncared for, like the woman at the well; freed from chronic isolation and suffering, like the woman with the ongoing hemorrhage; freed from the grip of sin and death, like Mary Magdalene. And it’s not “freed” in the way I’ve sometimes heard the word used, as if this were only a metaphorical freedom from the spiritual burden of such circumstances while I wait to die and go to heaven where my freedom will become a reality. This freedom is a reality for today. Jesus, becoming human and knowing what it is to suffer a human life and death, sees us in our shackles of wrong and being wronged, and does not ask us to stay in them.

The news is good, and it’s good for everyone. Even for these women, even for today’s women, even for me.

I’ve tasted the fruit of the True Vine—and now, anything less, even if it’s produced within the Church itself, is acrid on my tongue.

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Psalm 34:8