Got Milk?

While I was visiting my infant grandson the one day, his mother sat down next to me and quietly began to speak. I had been holding the pacifier in his mouth hoping he would nap as I held him.

The moment the little sprout heard mother’s voice he began to smack and lick his lips. Never mind she had finished feeding him only a short time before. Now his eyes were wide open and those little arms and legs were frantically moving to locate and get back to Mom and, well, back at it.

That scene brought to mind a question I’d once pondered. As I studied for a Sunday school class one evening I read Simon Peter’s comments about “desiring sincere milk.” I envisioned Peter as a muscular apostle with thick callouses on his hands, having a fishy smell about him; but in this verse or two he carefully crafts a quite different likeness of God for us to consider–not as a rugged coworker, but as a young mother. We are her hungry infants, and she loves to hold and nourish from her own body the precious ones she created.

I’d heard of ice cold milk, chocolate milk, buttermilk, steamed milk, etc., but never “sincere” milk. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I decided the concept was too deep for me at the time so I just moved past it. But I would most certainly visit that topic again. I just never envisioned how, when, or where.

Seeing the passage unfold right in front of me, with my baby girl as the Mom, it quite literally brought the message home. God is the Master of giving us exactly what we need when we need it. We all recite those words without imagining His humanity. In the form of a Mom, we understand clearly that once you taste the goodness of what the Lord offers, nothing else in this world satisfies completely. Nothing.

The burly fisherman of old, probably recalling his own wife and children wrote,

“You’ve had a taste of God.

Now like infants at the breast,

Drink deeply of God’s pure loving-kindness.

Then you’ll grow up mature and whole in God.”

(I Pet 2:2 msg)

If the boy keeps eating the way he’s started out, “grow up” won’t be the only way he expands.(I Pet 2:2 msg)