I have no idea what its like to go hungry. I’ve been hungry before, and I’ve participated in the thirty-hour famine, but I have no concept what its like not to know where your next meal is coming from or to be deprived of all nutrients. It is just not a part of my life experience and the helplessness that comes with that depravity is difficult to relate to. However, despite the difficulty in a physical sense, I have a better grasp of what it is like in a spiritual sense. If I was a medical student or had the inclination to spend more time on the subject, I would fill this page with a description of what the body does during a time of starvation. From the initial pangs of hunger, to the body’s ability to disregard the initial impulse and sustain itself, to the eventual turning on its own members, I think the parallels to the spiritual realm would be significant. We experience the need for spiritual food and if we don’t get it, we can fool ourselves into thinking we are o.k. without it. Eventually this self-deception causes us to do things that spite ourselves because our hunger has no other outlet. Regardless of the growing obesity numbers in America, there is still plenty of lack. There is a lack for spiritual nourishment and truth. Unfortunately many choose to remain in their state of need rather than accept the One who can satisfy.
Blind Sight
One of the crazy things about language is that often times common phrases, when considering arduously, don’t make sense. For example – “jumbo shrimp.” How can something that’s quantified by its smallness, become big? Or, as one of my friends would say “true love.” Can it really be love if its not true? Isn’t therefore the phrase redundant?
One of the crazy things about God is that He also sometimes doesn’t make sense. At least not to us. Whether its because His are so high or are ways are so small (Isaiah 55:9), He has an amazing way of extracting the least-considered consequences. He just as a knack for causing things to turn out different than one would expect.
Paul’s life is a prime example of this. Before he had his heavenly name change, Saul was the persecutor of the church. He had studied the Law and knew what it taught, and sought to merit out its justice. On the road to Damascus he was struck by blindness and it was only then that he could truly see. Stopped in the road, he found the Way.
Oftentimes in life things don’t go the way I think they should. I’m glad that God is the type who doesn’t always require that things make (human) sense.