At a Sunday at church this Summer, I told an Italian speaking friend, “Dio è bene,” attempting to say “God is good.” This friend, rightly and politely corrected me, “No…Dio è buono.” This word correction threw me off. It was not that I was shocked that an Italian corrected my mediocrely enunciated conversational comment (My Italian pronunciation is not the best and boy do I know it!), but I was thrown off at the word being corrected from bene to buono. Bene is used interchangeably in a wide variety of situations for good, okay or well (in an approving sense of the term), while buono is largely used in terms of saying that food is good or tasty.
For example, if someone asks you if you are doing well and you want to reply by saying, “Yes, I am good, thanks.” you would say, “Si, sto bene, grazie.” However, say you were invited over to an Italian or Albanian family’s home for dinner (which can last for 3-5 hours with lots of food). Imagine it like a cheerful Thanksgiving Day in America where you hang out with family. Everyone hangs out for hours, chatting, joking about the local sports teams and comparing the latest weather or news. Eventually, the food, when it has finished cooking in the previously forbidden area of the Promised Land (that is, the kitchen), is delivered to the dining (or kitchen) table. When that glorious time finally and jubilantly arrives, this Italian manna from Heaven is devoured in a prolonged time of consuming dish upon dish around the dinner table with prayer, conversation and laughter. After stuffing your face and your gut beyond what you thought previously possible, you take in your surroundings, having thoroughly enjoyed the delightful litany of variety of the food and company. Then, with enthusiasm and humility, you want to tell these very gracious, welcoming and loving hosts that their food was very tasty. Here, you would use, “Tutto il cibo era molto buono.” In fact, you could probably say, “Grazie mille, tutto il cibo ed il tempo è stato molto stupendo, fantastico e molto, molto buono.”
This is the context I had in my mind when my friend corrected me on that Sunday in church when he told me, “No…Dio è buono.” For me, I looked at this and didn’t understand how they could use the word for God as the word used in situations around food. My gut reaction (pun intended) sarcastically was, “Oh, so God is tasty?” It didn’t connect well with my black and white brain to see buono used in this way so differently from what I had thought I had learned. I later tried to accept it just as, “I guess that’s Italian culture in the language. They can use the same terminology for God as for describing the food.”
But since then, God has shown me what He means by this difference of usage in wording in the Italian language. One of the verses that has come up more than a lot of others in Psalm 34:8a which says, “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good” (NKJV). The context for God being good in a food way of thinking makes sense through this verse.
Story time: If you know me, you know that I love to cook, eat, learn about food and see how others do things in the world of the kitchen. I grew up this way and it is truly one of my most dear hobbies that I am passionate about. As evidence of this, my Italian vocabulary is largely skewed towards words that are food, cooking or kitchen related. When I need to talk with Italian speakers to either converse to build a relationship, to practice my language skills or to learn a term, I feel so much more at home with the topic of food and the kitchen (my roommates recently humorously pointed this out when we went over to an Italian only-speaking household from the church and I was able to hold my own about cooking a specific dish but I was much more reserved about several other topics). All of this to say, God knew what He was doing when He called me to Italy. Psalm 37:4 tells us that He knows the desires of our hearts. He knew I had this passion for food – He gave it to me! But guess what? Italian culture is so entirely based off of food that I can totally thrive in it! Psalm 34:8a has taken on a whole new meaning for me. When I look at what God pulled me out of in my past, how He called me onto the mission field and then opened the door for me to come here to Italy, I can only smile and be glad that God is in charge of my operations.
God is good, and I can taste and see that.
Recently, I had been dwelling on this verse and how to formulate my thoughts to put it into a blog post to share. I just couldn’t come up with a good example to bring everything together. Okay, so it’s Thursday night here. I decide on a wild hare around 7:45pm, that I’m going to bake some applesauce bread which I had made once before and had turned out well. I go to the store, get the couple of ingredients I need and start to make the bread (it’s more like a batter cake, but not as sweet). I’m bustling around our little kitchen making the batter. The doorbell rings at 8pm in the evening! I cautiously go to the door, brushing my hands off on my hoodie and I prepare myself to use any Italian I may need to utilize for whomever is there.
I open the door and there is our elderly upstairs neighbor who, in the best way I can describe her, is an Eastern-European babushka who almost always has a smile on her face. In her hand, she holds a big plastic bag of like, 20 apples. She immediately hands the bag to me and tells me in Italian that they are for us in the apartment to eat! I thank her very much and ask her in Italian, “Are you sure? Really?” to which she says “Eat them all!” and then cheerfully heads upstairs back to her apartment. I close the door and take this new bounty of fruit to the kitchen table. Following her request, I proceed to core and slice up an apple for myself. The first bite tells it all. Refreshingly cool, crisp, juicy and sweet – it’s an excellent apple and probably the best one I’ve had here in Italy so far. I quickly gobbled up the rest of the apple because of it’s incredible flavor. It was at that point that the Lord impressed something on me and spoke, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.” A neighbor had me and my roommates in mind, decided to buy us a whole giant bag of delicious apples and bless us in our little world. Oh, I have tasted through this apple and have seen that the Lord is indeed good.
This is such a picture of the Gospel through Psalm 34:8a. God calls us to taste and see His goodness. We cannot do that unless we receive His free gift of grace. When we do receive that spiritual (and sometimes literal) taste of His grace, it is the reminder of how good He really is to us. God is buono through all of this. We so often want to do our own thing, try to figure out the recipe to our life without looking to the Author of the Recipe Book and then toss some ingredients together to make spiritual growth happen. But sometimes, we just need to have His grace show up at our door with a bag of cool, refreshing and delicious apples as a reminder that He loves us and wants us to know Him more.
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