Properly hungry
When you give it to them, they gather it up;
When you open your hand, they are filled with good things. Psalm 104:28
Read John 6:30—35
I know hunger. I know it when I miss one meal. I call it ‘gnawing hunger’ because it eats into me. It speaks to my body. It tells me what I am missing. It feels like my stomach is eating into myself. I can certainly not satisfy myself my gnawing upon myself. Thirst I know, too. I call it ‘craving’. Craving thirst. It’s a signal: satisfy this thirst, or your life will be lost. If I leave it unsatisfied too long, if I think I can ignore it, get used to it, and leave it, the outcome will be death. All this I can take into my time with Jesus tonight. I hear his word. He speaks it to people who are desperately hungry. I know them around me, people with a life-threatening spiritual hunger and thirst. And he speaks it to me. He offers himself to me. He asks of me that I sit with him until I can say how it is that I find him so satisfying, at what level I find that he is the bread of life.
Lord, you are the bread of my life. You declare it. You satisfy. You give yourself, bread from heaven, true bread. Drink from heaven. True drink. Here I meet God. You offer yourself to all the world, so I pray for those around me who I know need you. Those whose need is desperate. Some I know, by what they have said and by what they are doing, are panicking from hunger and thirst. But all alike I pray for. I pray that I too, above all, will draw hungrily upon you for my deepest life satisfaction. I pray this because you promise this to me. You are the bread of my life.