Taste and See
Have you ever had something happen in your life that illustrated the power of doubt verses belief? A time you were telling someone a simple truth, but concerning which you met with skepticism? A time when you tasted something and people doubted that you ate? I have, and I’m about to tell the story. (Note this post is a shortened, edited version of something I first wrote about for my personal blog, Travissbigidea, in Nov of 2017.)
I’m in the Army Reserve and in 2017 I and other members of my Army Reserve unit attended a training exercise that lasted a month for my unit (called JRTC) held in Fort Polk, Louisiana. Fort Polk is rather infamous among people in the US Army for not being a very pleasant place. Perhaps some of its reputation isn’t completely deserved, but I personally had a miserable time at Fort Polk.
MRE/First strike field rations. Image credit: According2Robyn
That misery included many particular aspects of my experience, including sleeping in body armor many nights and not having proper bathroom facilities (so I had to go to the woods and dig a hole on numerous occasions) but especially touched on food. Not only had I been in a field training environment for two weeks in which we ate field rations (MREs and and “First Strike” rations), we had been poorly fed during the week prior to going out into what everyone called “the box”–the place where the training exercise took place.
Food served overseas to US Army. Image credit: Thrillist
US military dining isn’t usually bad, not anymore. The modern Army usually has contractors provide meals, unlike the infamously bad Army cooks of the Vietnam War and earlier. And it happens to be true that the contractors feed us very well, almost always. The food I ate while deployed to Iraq was especially good–and I realize that may sound like a joke, but it really was true. KBR (later BR) ran the military dining facilities in Iraq while I was there in 2008 and the food was actually amazingly good at times.
Imagine much more crowding and less food and you’ll get a picture of the 52nd BSB’s meals. Image credit: Army.mil
But in the week of getting ready to go to the field in Louisiana, we had eaten hot food provided by one of the supporting units for our JRTC exercise, the 52nd Brigade Support Battalion (BSB). Which meant that instead of the contractors who usually feed troops in the modern Army, our food was actually supplied by US Army cooks. What they prepared wasn’t very tasty, plus, the dining area was horribly mismanaged, with thousands of troops trying to pile into the same single fabric-topped building at the same time. The building was large; it sat hundreds, but the demand was in the thousands, so lines were long; sometimes food ran out before everyone ate and the hot portion of the meals usually wound up being cold. Plus there were limited places to sit, so you had to rush through the bit of food you got and the trash cans that filled up with accumulated debris from the cardboard food trays and cups and plastic eating utensils were not quickly emptied out, so piled up garbage in the back of the building became common. It was better than eating grass and dirt, but wasn’t very nice, overall.
So after coming back from the “box” we spent the night at one of the mock bases that wasn’t far outside the training area (i.e. the box). (It was called “FOB Warrior.”) We finally were in the position where we had some freedom back, even though we still were going to sleep in a barracks building that night. Some members of my Army Reserve unit were talking about ordering pizza for everyone.
But I didn’t want to pay for pizza (I’m awfully cheap at times). So I decided to trudge out to the military dining facility this base had and eat whatever food they offered. My expectations were pretty low, but food is food and its primary job is to keep you alive, so I was willing to put up with whatever they served.
Steak cooking at Kunsan Air Base in Korea. Image credit: Kunsan Air Base.
I came to a building with a fabric top, not too different from the place where the 52nd BSB had poorly fed us. But to my surprise, contractors were serving the food. And the meal was steak and shrimp. With fresh salad and fruit. With cheesecake for dessert (chilled cheesecake). The building was clean, the contractors were polite; it was really good food and furthermore, was free.
I returned to the barracks we’d been put in with the good news of how surprisingly good the food was. And I immediately met with skepticism from two soldiers, a sergeant and a captain, who both reasoned with me that what I was saying could not be true.
In fact, they acted like they believed I was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. To make fools of them. And as we talked, I remembered more details than what I had already mentioned. I said, “And they had mashed potatoes. And cans of soda in the corner, Cokes, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, lots of brands. And in addition to the cheesecake, they had chocolate chip cookies, really big cookies, soft, with M&Ms in them.”
“And I bet the woman serving them was a beautiful blonde who had really big breasts pouring out of her blouse,” said the sergeant with obvious snark.
“Yeah, Perry, I can’t help noticing this story keeps getting better and better,” added the captain with a laugh.
Answering the sergeant, I said, “Um, no. But the woman taking our numbers was really cute.” Turning to the captain, I added, “Yeah, I recognize this sounds incredible, but every word is true. Honest.”
The conversation went back and forth like that, never in the exact words I just used, but along those lines. In the end, I failed to convince them that the shrimp and steak meal really existed. But it did.
This struck me after the fact as being something like sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with people. I had a story to tell, a true story, but my story was not believed, because it did not match things the people I told had already seen and experienced themselves. It was easier for them to think I was making it up and dismiss what I said than investigate for themselves.
It would have taken the two members of my unit a mere five minutes to walk down the road to find out if what I was saying about the meal was true or not. But they would not do it. If people won’t even walk five minutes down a road, how much more will skepticism prevent someone from giving the Gospel a chance?
“Taste and see that the Lord is good,” begins Psalm 34:8, implying the God can be known by those who want to find Him. Those who seek out and test the truth about God can find not only that He is real, but furthermore, that God is good.
My experience led me to make a few observations:
- Those who disbelieve may in fact be very intelligent people and very convincing in their disbelief. The captain and sergeant I was speaking to were actually very smart guys. I wound up laughing after a while talking about the meal because I knew from their point of view what I was saying sounded ridiculous. Of course, when I laughed, they were only even more convinced I was trying to play a joke on them. I promised them I was not and in fact gave them more details—which should have helped them realize I wasn’t making things up (plus, I’m not the kind of person that plays this kind of joke), but that didn’t actually help. Again, these were not dumb guys—they were two of the smartest guys in my unit. They didn’t manage to convince me the meal I’d eaten didn’t exist, but they did have me doubting my own credibility.
- Those who have tasted the meal (or otherwise experienced something good) are in fact under no obligation to explain how it happened. At the time I was talking about the meal I ate, I could and did give more information that should have made the meal make more sense, i.e. it wasn’t the 52nd BSB serving the meal, it was civilian contractors. Plus maybe Fort Polk wanted to make the experience coming out of field training more pleasant than going into the training. But in the end, I did not know why the change in food happened. I just knew it had happened. I offered my speculation as to why the food changed to the skeptics to help them make sense of the event I was describing. And doing that was actually a good thing. However, all I really knew is what I’d witnessed myself. A meal was served; I partook. Likewise, I experience the presence of God in my life every day. My experience is real—I can attempt to explain logically the role of God in the universe to the doubters in order to attempt to make the path to “tasting” themselves easy for them. But in fact I don’t owe them that explanation. My experience requires no explanation to make it true. And I actually may not be able to explain very well, if at all. It doesn’t matter—what I have witnessed is what I have witnessed. Which leads me to the next point:
- Explanations of witnessed events are not required to believe them and it’s unreasonable to expect otherwise. Yes, it’s possible for people to delude themselves. Yes, it could be I imagined the meal I ate, though for me that would be more unlikely than me eating it, since I don’t regularly have delusions of eating imaginary food, no matter what the skeptics thought about the situation (though in fairness, they maintained I was trying to pull a joke on them, not that I was delusional). Yes, it could be I have imagined God’s presence in my life, but other than God, I do not in fact routinely sense people who are not around. I have every reason in fact to believe what my experience tells me, even if I cannot fully explain it. And that’s normal. Not irrational, not weird. Simply how experience ordinarily works.
- Getting a detail wrong does not invalidate the entire witness. I realized after a bit that I had misspoken—the potatoes were not mashed potatoes, they were scalloped, though served with the kind of scoop you normally see with mashed potatoes. But getting that detail wrong did not invalidate the overall tenor of what I witnessed. Likewise, a person can be mistaken about elements of their religious life and belief while still in fact witnessing something that’s true at its core. Which leads to my final point:
- Disbelief can be a choice. The guys I spoke with about the meal were bright. They knew they were bright. They weren’t willing to be suckered in with false info, which they knew could happen. They may have even noticed a contradiction in what I was saying, that I first mentioned mashed potatoes but later changed to scalloped. But in fact their skeptical reasoning did not and could not trump something that I had eaten myself. Something could happen they had not planned for, something that did not make sense to them. Reality can in fact go in directions they had previously ruled out as “not possible.” But instead of giving the idea they might be wrong a chance, they in effect chose to disbelieve by not even investigating what there was to investigate, by not even walking down the road for five minutes. By ruling out what I said in advance, by deciding in advance not to investigate, they decided to disbelieve. If that happens with something as simple as people disbelieving in a meal, it should be no surprise that some people in fact choose to disbelieve in the existence of God.
So for readers of this post, have you ever had a similar experience in which you were telling people truths that could have been easily verified, but you were treated with skepticism instead? Have you ever been told that something you knew happened, could not have happened? Please share your experience and thoughts in the comments below.
Good article, Travis. Basically every time I’ve shared my personal experience with God, I’m met with, “That may be true for you, but not for me,” which I think basically just means, “I think you’re either delusional or lying, but I don’t want to tell you that outright.” The problem is, the Gospel is so good it sounds completely ridiculous. And if it’s true, why do almost none of the people I know seem to experience it? It doesn’t make sense to hardly anyone, because there’s so little that seems plausible about it–until it cracks your world open and changes everything inside you.
Oh boy, flashbacks to retail. I work in a fabric store, and every so often, some clueless person walks in and doesn’t seem to believe that sewing is more complicated than they think it is. They’ll ask me where a specific pattern is, and when I explain the catalog system to them (like an old-fashioned library catalog system), they give me this look like it shouldn’t be this hard and I’m being unhelpful on purpose.
Like, bruh, look at that cabinet. There are hundreds, if not a couple thousand, of patterns from different companies in there. It’s nearly impossible for someone to have an encyclopedic knowledge of exactly what you’re looking for in there, especially when it changes every season. Also why the heck are you buying apparel fabric to make kitchen curtains, that’s needlessly expensive (but hey, it’s your money). Bruh, we don’t dye the fabric ourselves, it’s not like a paint store where you can pick your shade. Bruh, fabrics have standard widths, if you want an eight-foot wide fabric that isn’t muslin, weave that crap yourself. Yes, that width only comes in muslin, which comes in white and off-white. Bruh, we do not dye this crap ourselves, this isn’t like a paint store.
Your example is a very interesting one but I’m struck by some differences between it and what happened to me. In my case, the people I talked to were fully capable of understanding what I was saying…they just didn’t believe the idea to be credible in that time and place.
Whereas in your case, it seems people don’t really understand how the fabric business works and show disbelief in what you have to say as someone with inside knowledge of the business, based on their lack of prior comprehension. We could perhaps call the people that you mention who come to buy fabric, “people unwilling to acknowledge the depth of their ignorance.”
Whereas the people I was commenting on were more like, “people unwilling to acknowledge they could be incorrect, based on the fact they are smarter than most people, and know it.”
An atheist might say that people who doubt the validity of science are in the first group–they just don’t get how science actually works so they reject it. When faced with the existence of the second group, I would predict most atheists would say, “Oh, I acknowledge all the time I could be incorrect,” but in fact, they don’t really mean it. Not when it comes to the existence of the God of the Bible–they are SURE it’s not possible, even when credible people who are not ignorant and are not liars tell them otherwise.
Too bad you didn’t take any leftovers back as proof :p
A lot of times during more intense arguments I’ve had, people make assumptions about my reasons, thoughts and feelings and aren’t willing to accept that they could be incorrect about those assumptions. One thing that bothers me about that is that they act like they know me better than I know myself somehow. Like, sheesh, I’m inside my own mind, I know what I’m thinking and feeling, and apparently those people do not. Sometimes that’s due to miscommunication and the fact that it can be hard for people to describe what their reasons, feelings and thoughts actually are, though.
Technically those things can’t be easily verified visually, but often enough those issues could have been fixed if people were more willing to calm down, listen and understand. Actually, though, a verifiable fact is that they don’t know exactly what’s going on in other people’s heads and should probably check their own assumptions a little more.
The food was too good for leftovers. 🙂
About a half-hour after the conversation I recorded above, one bystander to the conversation actually checked it out and ate. He came back and agreed with me. Two or three others went after that. But most had pizza, which is what the guys I spoke with really had their hearts on.
That also could have had a spiritual application, but I stuck to the simpler story.
Eh, yeah. If people are already satisfied with what they have, they don’t necessarily have a reason to look further, which can be bad and good at the same time. Sounds like a situation where you were somewhat rewarded for seeking further instead of taking an easy option like pizza 😛
Well, if you will allow me to make this a spiritual metaphor, first of all what I had was unquestionably better than the not-very-good-pizza available for delivery the guys received. But they had not yet received it or even ordered it when I told them about the steak–but the very thought of pizza likely affected their perceptions of what I was saying. They had their intentions, their hearts if you will, fixed on what they believed was a better hope than what I was offering, so their protestations based strictly on logic according to the words they used were in reality not just based on logic alone. They were based at least in part on what they wanted–as I already said, what they hoped for.
The pizza they received, which came after a delay, which wasn’t that fresh, nor that good in the first place, which they had to pay for–they accepted as a substitute for something better, fresher, and free of charge.
In a rather obvious spiritual parallel, atheists’ protestations about the existence of God are usually based on logic but in fact, it isn’t logic alone that’s driving their disbelief. They also have a hope to enjoy the pleasures of this world and feel belief in God would interfere with that. Yet they wind up rejecting something better in favor of something worse in the long run…
Yeah.
Since I’ve been a little obsessed with cognitive functions and stuff, bringing up logic kind of made me think about some of the research I’ve been doing on that. A lot of C S Joseph’s videos have been good, and I guess the sources he uses make a distinction between logic and rationality. Logic being more like a boolean true false thought process, somewhat like what a computer uses. Technically everyone has both logic (Ti, also called introverted thinking) and rationale (Te, also called extroverted thinking), but will primarily use one or the other, and the exact way each person uses it depends on where each function sits in their cognitive stack.
Rationale is sort of like looking at all the data and evaluating it, I think. Like having multiple lines in mind evaluating true/false, and then the majority rules. It also has to do with beliefs. Since I’m an INTJ, Te (extroverted thinking/rationale) is my secondary/Parent function. But that means Ti/logic is my Critic (which I believe is the sixth cognitive function). So it’s like rationale kind of governs most of my functions and manages them (kind of like a parent would), and I guess it forms beliefs based off what it sees and knows could happen. But then Ti Critic comes along and reminds that Parent function to verify the truth, over and over, because INTJs kind of have a need for their beliefs to line up with the truth. To an extent it’s like that for everyone, but the verification is a huge deal for a lot of INTJs. That’s kind of why I use a lot of qualifiers in my speech sometimes. Part of me worries that I didn’t verify good enough and that something I said could be incorrect.
That said…I have no clue what personality type the people in your example were. They couldn’t all be INTJs, considering how rare the personality type is. But, I dunno, it comes across like a lot of them were using a more rational approach, while maybe the logical thing might have been just to go verify. Yet, they would have each been processing it in their heads differently, based off their experiences and personality type. Some of them might have just been running a stream of logic statements in their head, while others might have been evaluating the whole situation with rationale.
It’s interesting how the conclusion was more or less the same for most people. As you mentioned, people that already had their minds set on pizza were less likely to verify your claims. And then who knows what other data they were working with in their minds (like whether or not you tend to make jokes like that). The analogy you made is good, though. In a way it’s sad that the way our minds have to operate and survive in this world can interfere with our spiritual survival at times.
On Myers Briggs I test either INTP or INFP–which is a combination I’ve been told isn’t supposed to happen.
I find myself a bit skeptical about personality tests in general and the explanations the creators of such tests make in regard to how reasoning supposedly works. I think human behavior is significantly more complex that 16 possible combinations (even when including secondary personality traits).
Having said that, it’s true I was using the word “logic” rather loosely in what I said above. What I meant was, that instead of saying, “What I want is pizza so don’t waste my time with this” which was at least in part seems to have been an underlying motivation, they instead questioned the credibility of what I said by reference to past events, reference to the known nature of what we’d already witnessed, reference to their understanding of what the base was like, and reference to how my story supposedly “changed” as I remembered more details (they immediately noticed all inconsistencies in everything I said, which were not the result of fabrication, but the process of pulling up the memory). So they used “logic” as in “intellectual reasoning” to challenge what I’d witnessed with my own eyes, nose, hands, and mouth. Their reasoning would only partially qualify as logical in the strictest sense of the word.
I’m not sure what they would have tested on Myers Briggs but as I mentioned, I’m a bit skeptical about those tests anyway, so I wouldn’t hazard to guess.
Well, they probably wouldn’t have all had the same personality type. Though maybe the people that eventually investigated your claims had the same personality type or at least shared a few cognitive functions. Part of my point was that, regardless of their personality types (it’s doubtful they all had the same one), and regardless of what cognitive processes they used, most of them arrived more or less at the same conclusion.
Myers Briggs tests do tend to be inaccurate, and are really only good for ballparking one’s type. I think I took the humanmetrics test, which tends to get me right, but I took a test on another site and it got me way wrong. Part of the issue was that I ended up answering according to what I believe now, instead of how I operate (or at least used to operate).
The best way to type people is actually through their cognitive processes and interaction styles. It takes a while to truly understand those, though. One thing I’m trying to understand now is how to tell the difference between an Abstract and an Informative statement, since there’s a lot of similarities. Right now I think the main difference is that Abstract statements mainly deal in whatifs, whereas Informative statements just tend to be more vague and expect the listener to ascertain what the speaker wants and expects. Of course everyone is going to make both kinds of statements sometimes, but it’s a matter of what types of statements are their natural/primary/or default.
There are also four sides to the mind, so when I say that I’m an INTJ, that means that my Ego (the apex of who I am) is an INTJ. But people cognitive transition to other sides of their mind as needed (and depending on their life experiences and how they learn to solve problems) One of the other sides of my mind is an ESFP, which is often nicknamed the entertainer. When I am reasonably comfortable and caught up in a situation and trying to please and entertain people, that side of me comes out. That tends to manifest in a slight mischevious streak, and at that point I can actually manage to be funny. But, since it is not my ego, it takes a lot of energy and isn’t a mode that’s healthy for me to stay in forever.
There might be more than 16 types, for all we know, but it’s also likely that there’s 16 types, but that the other differences we see are due to life experiences and upbringing. The current me acts way different than the thirteen year old me, for instance, but my cognitive functions were the same all along. I’ve just learned to use my traits differently as I’ve matured. So nurture would account for a lot of the complexity we see.
There’s also personality disorders to consider. Antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy) is going to greatly impact behavior, but presumably, a psychopath could have any Myers Briggs type.
Words can have different meanings depending on the context they are used, and you kind of just seemed to be using the word logic in a conversational way, which is totally fine. It just reminded me of personality type stuff since one of the sources I’ve been learning from makes a distinction between Rationale and Logic. That distinction is fine for that source’s discussion of personality type, but of course other people are going to use those words differently in other contexts.
Perhaps the steak & shrimp dinner was unbelievable because it was too good to be true. If you had told them there was beef stew down the road with iced tea and rolls, maybe they would have been more inclined to believe.
When I witness, I many times feel that what I’m saying about my Christian experience sounds “too good to be true” in the minds of my audience, and thus, they can’t allow themselves to be “fooled” into believing. If I told them instead what a hard path it is to follow, and quote some of the negative aspects of Christianity, maybe they would listen more. But all the negative features are only negative from their point of view, on the other side of the divide, but not in my point of view.
I appreciate your point that we are tasked with telling what happened, not explaining how it happened.
Not that there’s anything wrong with us TRYING to explain how the unexpected benefit happened, but in the end our attempts to explain that isn’t as important as simply telling what we have witnessed.
The downside in the particular case I shared was having to walk 5 minutes to go get the meal. While that isn’t unusual at all in the military, the pizza these guys had delivered to them came to them–they didn’t have to walk anywhere. So in that way it was easier.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Very good story. It depicted memories of my tour in the Army along with trying to tell others about Jesus and His love. It’s good to know there are others who not only fight the battles of our nation’s liberties, but help free those who are in spiritual bondage.
Thanks for this wonderful article.
You should have told them there was pizza there and they could save their money. When they got there they wouldn’t see pizza, and they’d really be shown the fools then as they’d see you were telling the truth all along about everything else, but then they’d have to decide if pizza was really what they wanted.
If that didn’t work, you could simply have said, “Guys, I don’t care if you believe me or not. I just had a wonderful steak and shrimp dinner while you losers are ordering pizza just because you’re too lazy to walk a little bit for some free food that’s far superior. Now that I’m back from it, I’m going to go sit down and read (if you had a book) or play a game. Enjoy your cardboard with stuff on top, guys!” Then just turn around and walk away to your bunk or whatever.
You’re not responsible for whether they eat what you had or not. The blessing was yours, you told them, and they didn’t believe you. Tough on them! If they won’t believe you, it’s not your job to convince them it’s real. Obviously the more you talked, the worse it got. That’s pretty typical. And, like another commenter on here mentioned leftovers, if you really wanted to convince them, and you didn’t have leftovers, you could have walked back for a few shrimp, threw it in their faces and said, “So where did I get those, Neverland?”