God For Those Still Holding On 

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

This word is not for the faint of heart.

It is for the ones who have been through something.

It is for those who have had reasons to think that life is not good,

Those whose senses are blurred, who cannot see or hear or taste,

who are broken and afraid, those who are struggling but know–

at the end of the day, there is always a sunset.

And when the morning comes, the sun will always rise to bring light upon us.

So the people we consider weakest in our society are actually the ones who carry this with them the most. They are the ones who know that tasting of God is all the goodness that is needed for this life.

When we are stripped down to the most essential parts of ourselves, we know there that we can taste and know God.

In the book Christianity Rediscovered, we read about a place called Bagamoyo, based off the Swahili words bwaga meaning to lay down and moyo meaning heart. The book says:

Bagamoyo was the place where the captured slave, after his long trip from the interior, would put down his heart, put down the burden of his heart, give up hope–because it was his last contact with his own country before the trip to Zanzibar and a life of misery.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

When you are literally staring at your home for the last time, your land for the last time, or know full well that you are one of the last people to carry on the language of your tribe or culture, all that is left in that moment is to know that despite everything broken in this world, the Lord is good.

During the era of Native American boarding schools, the common phrase was “kill the Indian, save the man,” which meant that these Catholic or Christian run schools would do everything in their power to break the children of their culture.

They would burn their ceremonial clothing, their dolls, their feathers; they would throw away any artifacts deemed evil, and they would beat the tribal languages out of the children.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

People are living in invisible prisons today, friends.

Despite our intimate conversations in our homes, our moments comparing hardships with one another, there are people all over the world who, in their most raw moments, care only to sit in the presence of a God who calls them good and sits with them in an abundant goodness.

Perhaps we lack the ability because we are spiraling in a reality that is not grounded in an original reality of God.

But those who have lost hope in human love, those who have been broken and abused–they see God in the step by step, in the simple, in the essential.

When I cling to the rocks as I climb outside, or grab the holds on the climbing gym wall, I am telling myself that in that second, God is good and I am alive.

I don’t need to know what came before or what will come next.

All I know is that I can taste and see.

And it is indeed good.