The following article appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of live magazine.
When I was a child my parents fought the good fight for Family Time. After supper while the mostly empty dishes sat unwashed and the mostly full water glasses sat sweating on the corner of each placemat, my mom would pull out the increasingly dog-eared copy of the One Year Bible and embark on the daily reading. We were soon behind the prescribed day and one year eventually stretched to five as we slowed to a plod through Numbers and Deuteronomy and my siblings and I grew languid in our chairs as so-and-so begat such-and-such. I picked at the stray grains of rice that stuck to the blue quilted placemats my grandmother had made and listened with varying degrees of willingness. Some nights there was a lot of grumbling. Whether it was the Children of Israel or the children of David and Sylvia, it’s hard to say with much certainty.
But it was during Family Time that I first became aware of God’s way with words; His power of description. We were in Exodus and His promise to take the Israelites into a land flowing with milk and honey caught my attention. I wasn’t a literally-minded child, so I didn’t imagine rivers of sticky gold flowing down from the hills of Canaan or milk bursting forth in a geyser of rich abundance. But it did arrest my imagination, this phrase—a land flowing with milk and honey—and I let it roll around on my tongue like dessert.
The goodness of God is like milk and honey. Unexpectedly rich, delectably sweet; ingredients hidden in everything. But neither milk, nor honey come without time and effort. They are both the product of creation fulfilling its purpose in time to the glory of God. Milk is rich and nourishing. Honey is sweet and potent. It’s a strange and beautiful pitch, ‘flowing with milk and honey’, God’s own description of His intended goodness to His people.
This goodness of God’s is flowing everywhere—is always being made in unexpected pockets all over my life— if I have eyes to perceive it. If I keep my vision clear through humility and thankfulness. If I’m not watching that metaphorical clock with the mocking expression on its face and silently accusing God of abandonment. It is in the waiting and the pain that God’s goodness becomes rich and sweet. Where it is made memorable and sustaining instead of quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. Time is essential for refining my focus, for revealing what needs to be treated; for making honey sweet and milk rich in nourishment. It was the passage of time that made a word from an abashed stranger—who sheepishly approached to tell me that God wanted me to know that my unravelled engagement was not a waste—a nourishing balm to my wounded thoughts. God saw the whole picture painted in years and He said that it wasn’t a waste. The sweetness of that message lingers still through the revolving seasons of a life that didn’t unfold as planned.
God allows time to compound His goodness; intensifying it to an unfathomable sweetness that can only be tasted at the kairos of His will. Such as when my staunchly atheist grandfather suddenly proclaimed the power of the cross from his death bed to the utter astonishment of all. Generations had prayed for his salvation—from his own aged father on his knees beside his own hospital bed pleading for the soul of his son, to his great grand-children praying unprompted for ‘Great Grandpa Wolf to love Jesus’;— honey and milk made sweet and precious in the making, flowing over a century of yearning prayer for one self-made man who was unmade by his saviour in the twilight weeks of his earthly life.
God’s goodness is so much better than anything I could dream up. Moments so sweet and rich that they practically take your breath away like some careful confection of honey-sweetened cream. Answers from God made richer by time bringing them forth in the proper season.
