If you're like most Westerners, you take chocolate for granted. While always a treat, the delicious brown gold is everywhere, relatively cheap and ready to give you a sugar buzz. It's easy to assume that that's the case everywhere—particularly for the workers who grow the cocoa beans. After all, if you lived in a place where chocolate "grew on trees," wouldn't you be sick of the flavor?
But that's not the case. The journey from cocoa pod to Wonka-style chocolate bars is a very long one, and the product is unrecognizable to the workers who harvest the raw materials for chocolate. But a recent viral video shows cocoa farmers in Africa tasting chocolate for the first time. They weren't even sure what their hard-earned crops were even being made into. The look on their faces—pleasure and surprise and "this is so yummy"—is priceless as they taste the fruit of their labor.
Possible Preaching Angle:
It's a sweet illustration of how we can be so close to something wonderful—like the gospel—handling it all the time, but never tasting or benefitting from its end result—salvation, spiritual health, and joy. We can produce without tasting, or feed others without being nourished ourselves.
