Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.
1 Peter 2:2-3 (NIV)
After the First Taste
The light on the sandbar runs itself. It comes on with the dark, it turns on its own schedule, and when a lamp burns out the next one rotates into place on its own. Fog comes over the bar most nights and the beam goes out into it and stops short of the water. The woman who lives out there reads a gauge at eleven and signs the sheet under it.
Peter writes to people who have already tasted that the Lord is good. The taste came before the hunger did. Now he tells them to want more of it the way a newborn wants milk, loudly, on no schedule but its own, and he says they’ll grow up in their salvation by it.
God fed them before he asked them to be hungry, and if you know that taste at all, you came by it the same way. A baby wants milk with its whole body and has no argument to make about it. Peter asks these people to put down malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander, and then tells them what to want instead.
He tells them to go after the thing that will grow them, and he says it to all of them at once. On the days the wanting is gone, go back to what you already tasted. If you’ve tasted it, that part isn’t in question.
She first came out to the bar on her uncle’s boat, a kid on the deck at night, watching the beam come around and lay itself flat across the water. She’s out at the rail again tonight, where the beam gives out in the fog. She knows what’s past the place where it stops, because she was out there long before she ever lived here.
A Prayer to Remember
The one I keep praying for hasn’t wanted you in years and wouldn’t say so to anyone. Do what my arguing can’t do, God, and let them run into you somewhere I’m not. I’ll stop working on them and wait.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
