Flavour Country

How do we understand flavours beyond food?

On holidays this past summer, I had a tee time booked with a friend for 8:00am. As much as I would like to be – I’m not a morning person, but for whatever reason I was unusually awake unreasonably early. I woke up in a big way at 4:30am.

With a lot of extra time on my hands before golfing my ball in and out of the rhubarb, I found myself in my study scanning the shelves for a book to chew.

I cracked one I had gotten a year ago at Catalyst (= church leadership conference, held annually in the Atlanta area). The book was by Andy Stanley (& friends) – if I could put my hand on it at the moment I’d tell you the title of it. Something like: 7 Practices of Effective Ministry. Andy is one of the leaders responsible for the Catalyst conference.

As I read the introduction – I re-experienced the flavour of those two jam-packed days spent in the outskirts of Atlanta: 2 interstate-service-station-coffee-fueled-all-night-drives, Cracker Barrels, Peachtree (X20), free books & t-shirts, listening to an all-star line-up of speakers, stocking up on leadership books and ministry resources, and drinking a lot of amazing free coffee (Landofathousandhills.com).

How do you explain that?

It’s not that I was reminded of the experience – the book itself had the . . . the . . . the Catalyst flavour. Sure the guy that wrote it also had his hand in the conference itself, but how do you account for the unmistakable similarity in flavour and impression between something somebody writes, and two days worth of presentations put on by a variety of people, on a variety of different topics?

Where do these flavours come from? Why are some stronger than others? What flavour am I giving off?