Steeping in God's Word

Okay, so weird title, right? Well, it is unless you're into tea. So, again, I've been learning a LOT at the tea room. Everything from how to set up food trays and arrange the food on them to setting the tables, from making tea to making resets. There's a whole lot to learn, but something I got thinking about now, is something that I just learned from watching the tea being made.

Now, when you make tea, you only want to let it steep for a certain amount of time or else it either gets really bitter or it loses all its flavor. Steep it too little and you get watery tea. Steep it just right and you have the perfect pot of tea. With that in mind, I kind of thought of a kind of "parable" similar to the one about the seed and the soil. This is kind of how I figured it.

Whenever we read God's Word, we learn a lot from it, but their are times when we don't always read it the right way. If we try to read too much at time and we don't understand it, but we keep just plugging away until, finally, we just give up cause it doesn't make sense, it's kind of like the bitter tea made by steeping too long or tea that's lost all it's flavor. We haven't stopped to "taste" or think about what we're learning, we just keep going till it gets so confusing that we really haven't gotten anything out of it, so like with a bitter tea, we have to go back and start all over again. Or like with flavorless tea, where, since we don't understand what we're reading, we lose interest. We need to slow down and "taste", or make sure we understand what we're reading, before we can reach our full potential.
If we read too little, maybe just every great once in a while, then we have a watery tea that's steeped to little. Yes, we've learned some things, but there's not a whole lot of body to it, we're missing some flavors, some important parts. We need to spend more time reading God's Word consistently, we need to steep a little more, to get to our full potential.

And finally, we have that perfect pot of tea, when we spend some time each day in God's Word, making sure we understand what is written, and learning more and more from it. We're actually getting something from it now, in fact it's helping us, drawing us closer to God. It's full of body and flavor, and we keep wanting more of it, because we do understand it.

I hope that made sense and wasn't completely confusing. I also hope that it encourages you to read your Bible daily and grow continually closer to our Lord and Savior.