I had been moving in the same water for a some time, and somewhere along the way I started calling it a walk.
The strokes looked like progress. You get tired the way you would get tired on a real journey, so the fatigue feels earned. But the shoreline never changes. And if you are honest about it, you know the difference between swimming toward something and treading water to keep your head up.
For a while I thought the dullness was a gap in what I knew. I needed a better study, a newer book, one more framework laid over the last one. So I went looking for richer food. And the richer food tasted like cardboard.
Hebrews has a name for what was actually wrong with me, and it is not flattering. “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:12–14, ESV).
Read that again slowly. The problem was never the food. The food was solid. The problem was the palate.
A palate is built by what it eats. Feed it sugar long enough and a ripe tomato can taste like nothing at all. The very instrument you use to judge the meal has been shaped by every meal that came before it. So when the dense, demanding word of God arrives and a person sets it down and says it tastes like cardboard, the honest reading is not that the bread went stale. It is that the mouth was raised on something thinner. And underneath all of it ran an invitation I had stopped hearing years ago, the one about tasting and seeing.
Here is the part that finally loosened something in me. There is a law written into the matter of the world, and it runs in only one direction. Leave a garden alone and you do not come back to find it more orderly. Leave the garage, the body, the old friendship alone, and the same thing happens. Things come apart on their own. Things never come together on their own. Heat spreads out and never gathers; the iron rusts; the sandcastle slumps back into sand; the room you cleaned a week ago is somehow a mess again and nobody can say exactly when. Physicists have a cold phrase for it. The rest of us just call it the way of things.
The Father set that law into creation long before anyone had the equations for it. And what is true of the garden is just as true of the soul. A palate does not drift upward toward solid food. Left to itself, it reverts. It goes back to milk. The dullness I kept treating as some private failure was, in part, the world running its one direction through me, the way it runs through anything left untended.
I am making that sound like a lecture. Let me say it plainer. Nobody grows up by accident.
Which makes the rebuke in Hebrews harder, not softer. “By this time you ought to be teachers.” Time had passed. The years had stacked up. And the years, by themselves, had taught the palate nothing, because a calendar cannot train a mouth; only the daily, unglamorous practice can. A person can sit under good teaching for decades and still arrive carrying a child’s discernment, because the years had quietly been mistaken for the work.
If that were the whole letter, it would crush you. It is not. The same writer who calls them children turns a few lines later and says, “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation” (Hebrews 6:9, ESV). The honesty about how far behind they are never curdles into a sentence against them. He believes better of these people than his own rebuke would suggest, and he stops to tell them so.
And then there is the question the whole thing turns on. What is the solid food? What is the dense thing the trained palate is finally able to taste? It is not even a more complicated doctrine. It is a power. Paul prays that his readers would come to know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19–20, ESV).
That claim is larger than it looks. Everything in this world runs down; the direction is always toward the grave. And then one morning the direction reversed. One tomb where the decay ran backward. And that reversal was not powered from inside the system; nothing in here had the strength for it. It came from outside. Paul says the very power that raised Jesus up out of death, against the whole grain of the world, is turned toward the person you actually are, not the better one you keep waiting to become. “Toward us who believe.”
That invitation had been open the whole time, long before Hebrews put words to the problem. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8, ESV). The command assumes a mouth, and a mouth is a thing that can be taught.
So I am learning to stop waiting until I feel mature before I act like it. That feeling arrives last, if it arrives at all. Before it, there is only the bite. You take the dense thing while it still tastes like cardboard, and you take it again the next day, and the body that has been fed thin food for years begins, slowly, to remember what it was made for. The change is not yours to manufacture. The strength to digest what you are swallowing was never your own. It is the risen Christ’s, lent to you every day, the same strength that carried Him up out of the grave.
I am still in the water some mornings. But I have stopped calling it a walk. And I have been reaching for the food I cannot yet taste, the same food set in front of all of us, on the word of the One who promised the palate can be retrained.
Texts: Psalm 34:8; Hebrews 5:12–14; Hebrews 6:9; Ephesians 1:19–20 (ESV).
