FLAVOR

The wild salmon that live in the North Pacific Ocean have to fight those waters for years to get back to their spawning grounds. According to the “foodies”, it is the wild salmon that have the best "flavor". They attribute that flavor to all the fighting they have to do to survive and the struggle to get back to where they were born.

Flavor is the quality of anything which affects the taste. When someone remarks on the flavor of something they are trying to describe the specific way something tastes. Flavor can also be used to describe the act of adding a taste alteration to change the taste to something. This is usually done by adding. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

You wonder why you go through so much struggling in your life? God wants you to have the best flavor for this world! He is conforming us into the image of His Son (Romans 8:29 “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son”), and it takes a lot of work for some of us. He has to “add” His flavoring all the way through our journey to get us to be tasteful and flavor “full”.

Only God knows what circumstances and situations in our lives will cause us to swim upstream. Only He knows what will make us stronger and what will cause us to search for Him with all our hearts.

Acts 17:26-28 tells us that:
“26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, 27 that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28 for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children.”

He allows circumstances in our lives to cause us to “grope” for Him; groping as a man in total darkness for a way to the light. He knows where we need to be to draw closer to Him. He knows what will bring out our full flavor to this world! He knows what will cause us to reflect the image of His Son to this lost and dying world.

We have that inborn nature, just like the salmon. The salmon have to get back to where they came from to fulfill their purpose in life. No matter how far away they have gone, that innate motivation causes them to swim against the hardest waves and tides to get back to where they belong. During the “process”, something wonderful happens to them. During that fight to get back, they become very strong and full of flavor for someone else.

We have that innate motivation inside of us as well. We have a void to fill. We have someplace we have to be. Nothing else will fulfill that void but getting back to where we belong. No matter what we try as alternatives, nothing will fill His spot. We strive all of our lives to get back to that place, the place of communion with God, the place of our beginning. "He also has planted Eternity in men's heart and mind (a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun, but only God can satisfy). Ecclesiastes 3:11 Amplified.

We’re always swimming upstream to find our way back to God, whether we realize it or not. People take many different routes, but are all innately trying to “full fill”. Only He can fill His place. Just as the salmon, only when we arrive at our destination, is their life complete….our desitnation of communion with God. Only then are they the best flavor they can be for others.