Taste and See

I'm coming to the end of what proved to be a month-long ordeal, JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center), at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I am here with my Army Reserve unit, naturally, where we spent a week on orders prior to going to Louisiana, a week preparing to go to our field training in Louisiana, and then two weeks “in the box,” i.e. in the midst of our particular war scenario.

I'd like to write a post about the war scenario itself, but a particular incident that happened coming out of the field yesterday gave me something to write about first.

My fellow civil affairs troops were looking for a good meal after a week of eating field rations (both MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—and “First Strike” rations) and were talking pizza, but I wanted to save money and instead of cough up money for pizza, trudged over to the military dining facility at the rather primitive location we wound up being billeted in, “FOB Warrior.”

Military dining isn’t usually bad. 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 the contractors feed us very well, almost always.

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. For once, we actually were eating food provided by military cooks. While better than eating, say, wood chips and grass, it wasn’t what a well-fed American Soldier call “good eating.” 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 often it wound up being cold.

So, my expectations were low when going to eat at the dining facility at FOB Warrior yesterday.  In a building with a fabric top. 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).

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 I personally know to be very intelligent, who both reasoned with me that what I was saying could not be true.

In fact, they stated 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 they shared here. 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 a really cute Latina.” 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 a moment worth of drawing an analogy. “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.

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.

It also bears noting that while I write fiction, I never maintain something is true that I know is actually false for any purpose. Not to make a joke—and not for any other reason either. So they had no particular reason to presume I was lying to them, but they chose to believe that I was, because that made more sense to them that me telling the truth. This leads to a conclusion that I’m not just basing on this one event, but which this event illustrates well:

1.      Some people are naturally disinclined to believe a witness talking about something that “seems too good to be true.” Such people in fact often feel no particular need to investigate whether or not this something is true; if it makes no sense to them, it is not true, period. Note I am not maintaining that there was no way to give them more evidence. I could have in the case of the meal, definitely. However, they had sufficient evidence from me to investigate for themselves, but they simply wouldn’t do it. It was more believable to them that I, a person who tries very hard to be honest at all times, was deliberately lying (for the purpose of a joke), than to believe good food was just a short walk down the road. How much more are some people unwilling to contemplate that God might be real and might in fact care about the human race? To them, that’s nonsense and they simply won’t believe anyone who tells them otherwise.

2.      Those who disbelieve may in fact be very intelligent people and very convincing in their disbelief. 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 inventing the meal, but it didn’t. Again, these were not dumb guys—they were two of the smartest guys in my unit. After a while, their skepticism convinced me to give up on trying to persuade them, because after all, it wasn’t that important. But even if it had been important, a principle applies:

3.      Those who have tasted the meal (or otherwise experienced something) are in fact under no obligation to explain how it happened. I could and did give more information that should have made the meal make more sense, i.e. it wasn’t the 52^nd serving the meal, it was civilian contractors. But in the end, I did not know why the change in who was serving happened. I could and did speculate that it was to reward the Soldiers coming in from the field, to make us happy after our two weeks of suffering. But I don’t know that for certain. I offered it to the skeptics to help them make sense of the event I was describing, to make it clear I really was telling the truth. And there was nothing wrong with me doing that. However, all I really knew is what I 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 it to the doubters and attempt to make it clear to them. But in fact I don’t owe them that. 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:

4.      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 lying, 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.

5.      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 at its core is true. Which leads to my final point:

6.      Skeptics should take care not to dismiss the witness of others too soon. 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 they in fact were not the center of the universe and what they deduced to be true was not immutable scientific law. 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.” They should have shown some willingness to realize they could be wrong. As should skeptics who doubt the existence of God, to whom I say, “Investigate for yourself—you just might discover something you didn’t expect.”

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