September 2019 Articles

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Spiritual Corner: Sweet as Honey

Spiritual Corner: Sweet as Honey

I’m not sure how many people know this, but September is National Honey Month. Isn’t that exciting? I personally love honey and am fascinated by honey bees and beekeepers. Here are a few interesting facts for you to add to your knowledge of agriculture. Did you know that there are nearly 20,000 known species of bees throughout the world and 4,000 of them are native to the United States? How about that a single worker honeybee produces approximately 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime, which means it would take around 22,700 bees to fill a single jar of honey? Did you also know that honey comes in a variety of colors and flavors—including blue and purple?! (www.agfoundation.org/news/september-is-national-honey-month) The fact that stuck out to me the most, though, was that, while honey is very sweet and potent, you can add just a very small quantity of it to certain recipes without achieving an overwhelmingly sweet taste. However, the honey will still enhance the overall flavor of the dish. If you add too much of the honey, the sweetness can be overpowering, ruining the flavor of the meal (www.beeculture.com/national-honey-month/). The delicacy with which honey must be introduced to certain recipes reminds me of how Christians must interact with certain nonbelievers. I know that, as Christians, it’s easy for us to want to preach to others about Jesus or even correct people when we see that they are not being obedient to our Lord. Typically, we want to do this out of love because we care about others and we, just like God, want “all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth”(1st Timothy 2:4). However, just like whenever you add too much honey to a dish, we can sometimes be overpowering. We can ruin our witness to a nonbeliever just like the honey can ruin the flavor of the dish. Nonbelievers don’t want to be told what they’re doing wrong or what they need to be doing for God. They’re nonbelievers—us preaching to them does no good, except to make them think we are judgmental. What they need is honey in a small quantity, not to overpower them and overwhelm them with things they don’t understand or currently don’t care to know. They need the small quantity of honey to enhance their lives in just the right way. I believe that this means that we, as Christians, need to befriend these nonbelievers and slowly build a relationship with them. We need to strive to be a consistent friend in their lives and show them that they can count on us. We need to allow them to see the way that we live our lives, without condemning them or guilt-tripping them or forcing anything on them. We need to be kind, caring, and considerate and be available to our nonbeliever friends. While at first, too much honey introduced into their lives could overwhelm them, they might soon, after forming a relationship with us, begin to wonder why our lives look so sweet. We then will have the perfect opportunity to share about our faith in Jesus and they won’t feel cornered or condemned. We will have allowed them to witness how Jesus is present in our lives and we will have used our kindness to let them get to know us and our Savior. So the next time you feel led to call someone out on the wrong that they are doing, remember that they may not know Christ yet. Take some time to get to know them, lose the need to immediately correct them and remember, “kind words are like honey, sweet to the soul…” (Proverbs 16:24). Your kindness, rather than your condemnation, is much more likely to be what will lead them to Jesus, the one who can flavor their life with a sweetness that is just right. --Dana Alexander