Taste and See

One of the first words that would come out of people's mouths when I told them I was headed to Thailand was "the food!" Several friends even asked if that's why I'd chosen to go to my location. At Southern, Thai food is THE food. Everyone has their opinion of which Thai restaurant is the best and which dish tastes the best. Since I love to cook, especially with friends, going to Thailand has meant that cooking in the kitchen with the girls and learning how to make curry, noodles, and fried bananas.

When I first arrived in Thailand, all the food was different, and for the most part, oh so yummy! Besides everything having lots of chili in them, nothing was crazy different from things I had tried before. I especially loved any of the noodle dishes I ate at the market or the girls taught me to cook.

Cooking with the girls is always special because that's one way even those who speak very little English can connect with me. They teach me all the Thai words for fruits and vegetables and I teach them the same in English. We talk about the food being sour or sweet as we make it and laugh together even when we can't figure out what everyone is trying to communicate. Whenever I'm sick with a cold (as I'm currently am), I count down the days until I'm all better so I can get back to the kitchen and cook with them again.

For four months straight, Thai food was all I had besides two trips to the pizza restaurant and making spaghetti with the girls once. Rice for breakfast. Rice for lunch. And of course, rice for supper! The truth is, it really wasn't that bad. Yeah, sometimes when I would head to breakfast my appetite would drop when I only saw a plate of fried mushrooms (my least favorite dish), but thinking about how packed they are with protein, I ate it without complaint.

Then December came...Flying in on an airplane, my family came and whisked me off to Vietnam, Cambodia, and the south of Thailand. Each day we had new food, sometimes with European flavors and other times with unique Asian flavors. I'd look on my phone to find the best vegetarian restaurants around and then off our family would go to find where it was located. Every meal was something I looked forward to every day and it reminded me of all that can be done with the imagination when cooking is involved.

After two glorious weeks, back I went to KGS and back to the normal fare. As I sat down for the first meal back and brought the spoon up to my mouth, the tastes that I had enjoyed before now tasted bland. What had once been fine and even yummy now felt so flat. My taste buds had been reminded of the millions of flavor that can dance and twirl in my mouth. Herbs now filled more than three containers in my mind: garlic, salt and onion. There's such a big world out there...but instead it's Thai food with the same flavor every...single...day...

Even though I've been back for several week, the food still hasn't gotten back to what I remembered before I left. No matter what, I still find myself craving Western food and South American food at nearly every meal. I've gotten back to enjoying the meals here but still...my taste buds want more.

As I've walked in a relationship with Jesus, throughout my life there will be times that I catch a glimpse of Him in a special way that completely captivates me. At times my relationship has grown so deep that it feels like He really is beside me. Although, even fewer in number, there have been times that although I haven't heard an audible voice, it still felt that He had something direct to tell me in a way I believed to be His voice.

But just as there are those mountain-top adventures, there are also many valleys. The past year has been a valley, if I'm honest with you. If you asked me to name times I felt God's clear presence, I could probably count it on just a hand or two. Praying seems so one sided even as I've read books on prayer in hopes to help my seemingly helpless state. Ministry had drained me of joy and sometimes my inner peace, and what should be a blessing feels more like a task. 

On the outside I keep up the positive vibes. That's what people want from me and what they expect, right? Besides my mom and my boyfriend, few know just how hard the tug of hate and refusing to forgive those who have wronged me has pulled at my heart these past few weeks. Or how much I've played with the idea in my head that I am just a bad person destined for eternal damnation. Believe me, this future pastors wife has her share of doubts, both in the past and present.

And yet something won't let me give up...or maybe more specifically, Someone. As easy as it may be to think that my doubts are true or that Christianity just doesn't seem to live up to the apostolic potential, the taste that I've had of Jesus is still remembered in my mind. The dark days of uncertainty may sometimes feel more common than the mountain top experiences, but oh how sweet they taste to a hungry soul.

And the truth is, it's not even the happy-go-lucky times that keep me coming back to Jesus. It's the nights I stood crying in the rain from a broken heart yet felt at peace with what was happening all around me. It's the times I nearly let my selfishness and pride keep me from fulfilling the role God has called me to only to have Him bless me above and beyond what I could have even imagined in the first place. It's the times I doubted Him the most and shook my fist at Him and yet when my emotions were completely spent, all I knew was that He still loved me.

As Sara Hagerty puts it in her book, Every Bitter Thing, "When (we) are near enough to Him to smell His skin, the rest of the world and (our) circumstances fades into grey. His is that good." The memory of who He is and our daily search to know Him better changes everything within us, especially the way we see the world. What was sweet may not taste bitter, and even the most bitter things taste sweet. And those moments when we know Him to be who He is beyond a shadow of a doubt keeps pushing us back to find Him so close, and dare we keep believing, for Him to become even closer than He was before.