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At the same time, he learned how to watch out for short fuses and how to deal with a firecracker that failed to go off. He paid a price, but gained something that only firsthand experience could teach.

That early spring, Lanzi told me that Mr. Li, who grew peonies, was getting rid of some peony varieties. So we went to pick up some peony roots. Lanzi chose a brilliant red variety, while I went for a double white one. Each of us chose according to our own heart.

In the days that followed, I watered, fertilized, and removed insects regularly. I watched eagerly as the first shoots pushed through the soil and grew taller day by day. One morning, a flower bud quietly appeared.

When the peonies bloomed in May, I cut a few stems and placed them in a vase on my desk. Lanzi, on the other hand, would feel bad to see even a single stem broken, let alone cut flowers for a vase. We each chose our flowers according to our own hearts, and we used them in our own ways.

It then dawned on me that I would admire flowers someone else had grown and enjoy their fragrance, but I could never know the anxious waiting and quiet sweetness of caring for a flower to bloom. We could hear the crackle of fireworks, but I could never experience the excitement of lighting them with my own hand.

Years later, when I read Psalm 34, “Taste and see that the Lord is good”, I couldn’t help thinking back to those childhood memories. Not merely by seeing or hearing, but by tasting with every part of our being. Seeing and hearing are the postures of a bystander; seeing draws us into the experience itself.

There is someone in the Bible who tasted the Lord’s goodness in the most unexpected wilderness.

Her name was Hagar, an Egyptian servant of Sarai. She was given by her mistress to Abram to have a child. After she was pregnant, tensions arose within the household. Genesis 16 tells us that when Hagar saw she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. In response, Sarai treated her harshly, and Hagar fled.

Alone and pregnant, she fled into the wilderness - a barren and dangerous place. With no one to protect her and no family to turn to, where could she go? Return to Egypt? The journey was almost impossible.

Hagar fled into a desperate situation only to find herself in another with no way out. There, beside a spring in the wilderness, the angel of the Lord appeared to her. Rather than judging who was right or wrong, the angel simply showed her a way forward: “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” And a promise was also made to rekindle her hope: “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (Genesis 16:10).

Yet God’s grace went even further: God had heard her affliction and instructed that her son be named Ishmael. So Hagar proclaimed the Lord who spoke to her as “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13).

That was the turning point in Hagar’s life. Before this, the God she knew was the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God she had only observed from afar. But from that moment on, in the wilderness, God heard her cries, saw her affliction, spoke to her personally, and promised her a future filled with hope. Rather than simply hearing of God, Hagar encountered God in her own wilderness.

There was truth in what my mother said. But if we spend our whole lives trying to avoid effort, risk, and injury, we will remain mere bystanders - forever standing outside someone else’s gate, smelling the flowers, listening to the firecrackers, and then simply walking away.

My mother taught us to avoid risks. Yet no one can remain sheltered forever, Sooner or later, we will find ourselves in the wilderness. And it is often there that God invites us to experience the Lord’s presence.

My younger brother paid a price, but he gained unforgettable memories for Spring Festival. As for me, those peonies I had cared for taught me the mystery and joy of watching life grow.

Even if we read countless biographies and listen to the great cloud of witnesses, we never meet God in our wilderness, nor taste God’s grace for ourselves; then we are still only able to say, “My ears had heard of you”.

Hagar was a woman who had failed, been mistreated, and reached the end of the road. Yet, through Hagar’s story, God revealed what God is like, showing that God is not the God that only looks upon the “child of promise”, but the One who watches over the vulnerable and prepares a living path for them in the wilderness.

Therefore, go taste and see that the Lord is good, not staying in hearing of God but tasting God’s grace. Do not be content in smelling the fragrance outside someone’s yard. Go and find your own Beer Lahai Roi, the well of the Living One who sees you. There, you will meet your God and know how good God is.

Original source: Tian Feng, No. 559 (July 2026)
Author: Liu Lingwei
Translator: Bei Yu