A friend of mine in Kyushu, Japan wouldn’t stop talking about a ramen shop near his place. Homemade noodles. Chashu that melted. A broth he said took hours to get right. He described it so many times I could almost taste it myself, just from listening.
I finally went. And honestly — every bite made me wonder why I’d waited so long to try it for myself.
That’s basically the story of my faith, too.
Before I actually believed any of this, I heard plenty of testimonies. People telling me how awesome God is, how Jesus had completely turned their lives around. The stories only got more vivid the more I listened. But I hadn’t experienced any of it myself. I was living on a borrowed faith — running on other people’s stories instead of my own.
Then I met some incredible people in Kyushu, and something in me shifted. I couldn’t keep living off secondhand faith forever. I had to taste it for myself.
So I did. And it changed my heart in ways I didn’t expect — it gave me the ability to forgive people I never thought I’d be able to forgive. That alone was proof enough for me: Jesus is real. This faith is real.
Psalm 34:8 puts it better than I can:
Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Not hear and believe. Taste. There’s a real difference between hearing someone describe a meal and actually sitting down to eat it yourself. You can nod along to secondhand faith for a long time — good sermons, good verses, other people’s stories. But at some point you have to pull up a chair.
Taste and see for yourself.
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