Molasses

This episode is for you. 

It’s for you if things are going really well. 

And it’s for you if things are going not so well. 

It’s about a time in my life when things were not going to well, and since then I’ve looked back on it, and marvelled how God can use difficulty to reveal something of his goodness. 

Well over a decade ago, I was going through a difficult time, in my life, and also, in my faith. It wasn’t that I was doubting God, it was just that everything about life and faith felt difficult. It was hard to wake up and to go to sleep. It was hard to write, and hard to read. It felt hard to mother, and to work. Hard to read my Bible and hard to pray. It felt hard to be married. And I also knew that if I weren’t married, it would also feel hard to be single. Things were just…difficult. 

Each day felt like I was fighting my way through a thick sludge. It took a lot of effort and energy to do anything, even something as simple as walking. As simple as breathing. 

When a friend would ask me how I was, I would say this: I feel like I am walking through molasses.

Do you know molasses? It’s a thick, dark syrup made as part of the sugar refining process. If you use granulated sugar in baking or take it in your coffee or tea, then you enjoy the final result of the sugar refining process. Molasses is the lesser known, by-product of those fine, white crystals. It’s what makes brown sugar brown, and it’s what gives that depth of flavour to gingerbread. And can also be found in things like barbecue sauce, dark rye bread and even beer.

I sometimes have it on my oatmeal. It’s surprisingly high in iron.

In Australia, if you go looking for a jar of it it’s called treacle, which I don’t think is a name that truthfully communicates the nature of the substance. Treacle sounds light and dainty, it almost skips off the tongue as you say it. 

In contrast, molasses is thick and slow. Molasses sticks to your tongue as you say it, just as it takes effort to move a spoon through it.

During this time of difficulty, I travelled with my husband to the continent of Africa. We first visited Kenya, and then Uganda. 

On the last few days of our trip we headed north from Jinja to a remote resort for a few days. The only way to get there was to be driven by someone in a four-wheel drive. It wasn’t somewhere we could get ourselves. We had to be taken.

On the drive, after bouncing along for a long while down bumpy roads, we hit a long stretch of a road newly paved. The land outside the windows was the bright green of sugar cane fields. As soon as our journey smoothed, I feel asleep. And the driver carried us north in Uganda.

I was exhausted by travel, but no doubt also by the long hard trek through the sludge of the daily grind through which I’d been moving for months. 

It felt like I slept for a very long time. 

After several hours I woke up to the sound and feeling of the van shuddering as the driver downshifted. 

Up ahead was a truck, a tanker that had flipped over on its side along the road. The driver was not hurt, but the truck definitely was. In the crash, the tanker had burst open and the contents of it were pouring out onto the road. From the belly of the tank was pouring a thick, dark river of sludge down the stretch of the road.

It looked like an oil spill. 

But it didn’t smell like it. 

Do you smell that? I asked my husband. It was heavy and sweet. Almost overpouringly so.

We slowed to a crawl.

There were women walking through the spill, and there were more women walking along the road in front of us, and still more in the distance walking down a path to a village.

It looked like crude oil. But if it were oil, why would these women be so intent on scooping it up? So happy to walk through it?

Molasses!

The women were coming to the crash for one purpose, to collect whatever amount of sweetness they could from the scene of an accident, a difficulty, a hardship. 

The women had cups and containers and was bending down and scooping from the stream of the dark brown river pouring down the road, collecting what they could.

They wanted to taste it. To have it. To keep it. To make something good out of it!

As we slowly drove past the accident, I realised what it was these women were doing. 

They were walking through molasses. But not in the way that I had felt I was walking through molasses. 

No!

They were walking through molasses! On purpose!

It was during my trip to Africa that I heard an African commonplace for the first time: 

God is good, all of the time. 

All of the time, God is good. 

And it was a good commonplace or proverb to learn, because it doesn’t deny the experience of hardship or difficulty, but it does reframe it. No matter what time it is. A time of happiness or a time or sadness. A time of difficulty or a time of ease. A time of mourning or a time of celebration. A time of plenty or a time of want. 

God is good. All of the time. 

All of the time. God is good.

There will be times in life when I feel like I’m walking through molasses. 

Like a dark thick gloopy river of it is covering the road ahead.  

What do you do then?

Head toward it on purpose. And when you get there. Scoop it up and taste. Taste and see that the Lord is good.