Suckin' Up Honey

What is your perspective? ‘Life sucks’ or ‘Suck up life’? That’s kind of a crude play on words, but what I’m getting at is that it’s so easy to fall into the pattern of looking at the negatives. But if we do that, we get malnourished. We fail to “suck up,” or drink in, life.

Honeybees collect pollen, which is used to pollinate other plants; but they also suck up nectar, which is used as food for the entire colony. Pollen is actually a vital part of the honeybee’s diet—it is carried back to the comb in hairy receptacles on their hind legs. But you see, it has to be taken in (consumed) in order for it to then produce any good to continue the plant growth cycle or be of benefit to the honeybees’ offspring. The process is better explained in this statement found at honeybeesuite.com: “Most of the pollen is eaten by nurse bees. They use the nutrition absorbed from it to secrete royal jelly from their hypopharyngeal glands. The jelly is fed to young larvae, including workers, drones and queens.”

Nectar, which is consumed in fair amounts (but not to gorging proportions), is actually the sweet water that collects on plants such as flowers. It is nectar that is used by the bees to make honey, a daily and major part of the honeybee’s diet. According to honeyapiary.com, “Not only is honey hydroscopic and easily digestible, but at the same time it also has great antibacterial properties that keeps the bees in good health.”

For honeybees, pollen is the essence of life. Without it, the bees wouldn’t be adequately nourished and there wouldn’t be plants to get nectar from, and without nectar…no honey.

Just how does this relate to us, you may be wondering. What is our life source (or rather, who)? God the Father has our very lives in the palm of His hand, and without His Master Plan of Christ’s sacrifice, we would have no eternal life.

What is our nectar—something (in our case, someone) we aren’t meant to just experience for ourselves but are to give out so that it can be “food for the entire colony.” The Holy Spirit! He is the one who leads us into all truth and enables us to minister to one another, by His equipping and leading, throughout the entire body of Christ (colony). We give out of the great abundance of the Spirit in us, not of our own strength and wisdom. It’s from what we’ve “stored up” in Him through our fellowship with Him.

And what (who) is our honey? Jesus. Without Him, our spirits are in poor health—and actually, dead. His personal relationship with us is sweeter than honey. Psalm 19 talks about God’s law as more to be desired than gold and sweeter than any honey or drippings of the honeycomb. Proverbs 24:13 admonishes, “My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste” (ESV). Not only are we to take in (suck up) God’s written word, but we are to taste and see that the living Word, our Lord Jesus, is good. Many times in the Bible, honey is seen as a life-sustaining source, almost like manna in its significance. It was one of John the Baptist’s primary foods. In order for John to fulfill his calling, he had to be nourished. In order for us to fulfill ours, we must also be nourished—by His Spirit and by His Word.

That means…we should be spitting out those things that do not produce a good taste—those things that are contrary to the Word of God and His plans for us—which are to prosper us, not to harm us—to give us a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). If we believe that with all our hearts, we will reject the ‘life sucks’ mentality in favor of the opportunity to “suck up life.” And where do we go for that?

To the Rock of our salvation—Jesus. When things look bleak, ugly, impossible, and downright depressing, we need to pray, “Lord, your kingdom come; your will be done—right here, just like it is in heaven.” When we put our trust in Him, the hope we find “does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:5, NIV).

So you see, like the honeybee, there is an intertwined system of surviving and thriving in our lives. And ours comes through Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. But we must suck it up—there is more at stake than just us—there’s a whole colony waiting to be filled, and still others who don’t yet know how good God is. We can’t afford to waste time on what does not satisfy (Isaiah 52:5). “Only listen to me,” the Lord says, “and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare” (vs. 5b).

We can’t stay in our pits of despair when there is honey—for us—in the Rock, and the Rock is Jesus.