Yesterday we sang through Song of Solomon 1 on Grace Kim’s Worship with the Word set. As we ascribed to the Lord His worth, so much better than wine or any other earthly pleasure, as we testified of having tasted and seen that He is good, I again became convinced of the potency of Jesus’ love upon the human heart--more powerful than any other pleasure, satisfaction or reward.

I have tasted…I have seen…the Lord is good. His love is better than wine (Ps. 34:8, S.S. 1:2). And this right here is the power of His love. I’ve only ever had but a taste. I’ve tasted of Him so little…barely witnessing His delights, His beauty and His satisfactions. And yet, one taste has ruined me, has wounded me, for life. The world and all of its trinket-pleasures, all of its stifling satisfactions require great excess and overloading to touch the human person, while at the same time, having extracted all possible pleasure, one is left still painfully unsatisfied and greatly disillusioned from these empty and broken cisterns. But Jesus—how opposite is true of Him. One taste and one is wounded with love, one touch and one is ruined for anything less. So potent is His love, so piercing is His touch that one slightest experience of Him is enough to leave me in the wilderness all of my days, refusing the comforts of this world and reaching with arms outstretched toward the eternal pleasures found only in Him.

This is why John of the Cross cried out,

“Why, since you wounded this heart, don't you heal it? And why, since you stole it from me, do you leave it so, and fail to carry off what you have stolen?”

Well have the saints of history called this divine tasting a wound of love. For this painful burning, incessant and incurable will not leave my heart alone, will not allow me to return to the old chasings. Only one wound of love from the God of love is needed to keep my heart pining for years on end. I am left as a pilgrim just as the Lord planned, wandering as a stranger in this life, just as He so desired. O painful and precious wound that leaves me all alone except for when I am with the One in whom my soul loves.