Better than Ice Cream

I was the only teenager at the table full of well-dressed adults, the youth representative on an important committee to hire a new church music minister.

The elegant lady across the table, a regular at the country club where we were dining, leaned conspiratorially toward me and urged me to order the peppermint ice cream for dessert. "You’ll never look back," she said.

I took her word for it,­ and she was right. It was the creamiest, most delicious ice cream I’d ever had. Since then, I order it every time it is available. Since it’s often a seasonal thing, when the holidays approach, I stalk the grocery store aisle, longing for it to appear in the freezer section. Tasting that ice cream was life-changing.

When Saints Peter and the Apostles appear before the Sanhedrin in today’s reading from Acts 5, the high priest confronts them for teaching in Jesus’ name against his prior, strict instructions.

Yet Peter and the other Apostles can’t help themselves—they’ve experienced Jesus. They’ve walked with Him, eaten with Him, and seen His miracles. Being with Him has totally transformed their lives. They have to talk about Him. They have to share Him with the world.

They are His witnesses, and their mission is to spread the news about Him everywhere they can.

Our experience of Christ can be like that, too.

What if we take the Psalmist’s invitation to "taste and see how good the Lord is" (Psalm 34:9) and find ourselves in the middle of a life-changing encounter, the most tantalizing experience imaginable?

Jesus seeks out each one of us, invites us to come to Him, longs for each one of us to be in relationship with Him. We can talk to Him any time we want. He wants to be with us. The more closely we follow Him, the more we will long for His presence, and the more He will change our hearts to be like His.

Jesus seeks out each one of us. // @dere_abbeyClick to tweet

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Abbey Dupuy is the Assistant Theological Editor for Blessed is She and writes her life as a homeschooling mama of four frequently barefoot children. She is a graduate student in liturgical theology at Saint John's University. In her spare time, she enjoys running, gardening, coffee, and cookbooks, not usually at at the same time. She is a contributing author to our children's devotional prayer book called Rise Up and author of our Blessed Conversations: The Virtues study found here.