#5 Hungry
“Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the
bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never go
hungry,
and whoever believes in me will
never be thirsty.’ ”[1]
Have you ever had the “munchies?”
Sometimes you go through the kitchen looking for something to satisfy your
appetite, fulfill you, but you can’t find exactly what you want. You don’t want
something too sweet or too heavy, but there is this insatiable desire to find
it. And no matter how long and hard you look, nothing seems to be right. So you
finally do settle for something, but after eating it you haven’t been satisfied
and then you’re too full to try something else.
It’s amazing what we try to stuff
ourselves with to make us feel happy & satisfied. It could be a pint of Ben
& Jerry’s or a bag of potato chips. In graduate school I once read an
account of a patient in a psychiatric hospital which began with “I remember the
February when I ate nothing but Oreos.”
The great mathematician and
Christian, Pascal, said (in French) “Inside each person is a God-shaped
vacuum.”[2] That’s the way it is with our
spiritual lives. We have a hunger and thirst for God which cannot be filled by
anything else but Him. We can try money, professional success, drugs, alcohol,
and a million other things. We sometimes try to make significant others into
our god, but it just doesn’t work. In searching for the ultimate, we keep
putting the penultimate in His place, and it just doesn’t do the trick. When we
are honest with ourselves, we know when we haven’t found Him yet, but we are
tired of searching and substitute something or someone else.
This is because we were created
by God for a deep, personal and intimate relationship with Him. It’s as if each
of us has a stamp on us that says “Made by God.” We are made more than just
physical beings – we are made as spiritual beings, with a soul and personality.
When we are connected to God, then we become better at our relationships with
others, and ourselves.
So daily, read your Bible, pray
to God and fill yourself with His word, which is the bread of life and living
water. Then you are energized for a day of service to others.
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