Hunger is a Gift

I felt/heard God say something interesting to me the other day. It went along the lines of this: "Food is a gift, but the greater gift from Me is hunger."

It's a fascinating thought. Hunger is so natural that we seldom think of it apart from ourselves. Pain, we don't like, so we disassociate ourselves from it and can say, it's unpleasant but it's a gift from God to help us know when we're doing something that harms us physically. Or something like that.

As I meditated on this thought, this is what came to mind:

I pictured God making a bunch of people. Except, I can't quite picture that, so instead I pictured a loving wizard making a bunch of smurfs. He makes every aspect of them, fashions every single bit of each of them. He makes them with the intention, and the eager expectation, of loving them and being with them, and He makes them to be the counterpoint to His love, i.e. He designs them not just for community with each other but to need Him and find their fulfillment in Him. Not in a selfish way, but in a smart design kind of way.

Imagine the group of smurfs, all made to need their creator. Then the wizard gives them life and lets them live and commune and do stuff. He makes himself available to them. He shows them who he is and why they need him. Some of them respond, knowing logically that they need him. But most of them ignore him... because they have no desire. Their emotions are indifferent towards him.

It would break the wizard's heart. But the wizard who does nothing would not only be foolish, he would be cruel - cruel to make the smurfs to need him and be incomplete without him, yet to do nothing to make them want what they need.

That's where desire comes in. It is out of the wizard's love, and his grace, that he places a desire in the smurfs for Him. Slowly, the smurfs begin to realise that they feel different. And they begin to want to be with the wizard, to discover what the wizard is about, and to learn about how he made them and what was his plan for them. And that is where they find themselves complete... not only because they have found what they needed but because their wizard-given desires have been fulfilled by the wizard's very design.

That is a very loose picture of His grace for us. It is out of His grace that He not only makes us to need Him but causes us to want the One we need. To break it down into simpler terms, He made our bodies to need food, and He could have said, "you guys need food, but I'm not going to put any desire in you for it, so that you will seek food purely out of discipline and diligence. If you don't survive and you go hungry, it's your own fault for not being diligent. And if you are diligent, then you will do well."

That sounds like a very familiar kind of perspective, doesn't it? It's a common perspective in Singapore. And maybe in Asia (or East Asia?) in general - we tend to despise the emotional sometimes, as though feelings are a bain that we must put up with, and as though the most sincere acts are those which happen in spite of contrary emotions. Diligence is often prized over desire.

I believe this is an absolutely unbiblical view. Jesus wrote to the church in Ephesus, praising them for their good works (diligence! and obedience!) but saying, they had left their first love for Him, they must go back to their love for Him, and if they don't He will remove the lampstand from them. Their desire for Him meant a lot more - a LOT more - to Him than their faithfulness in doing good things.

Many of us Christians can't help having the mentality I described earlier because we've grown up with it, and that's okay - God accepts us as if we were perfect because we are covered by the blood of Christ. But we do need to realise that this view does not glorify God. That's because God Himself has emotions, and when we despise our emotions because they are emotions, we look down upon a piece of the nature of God. God has emotions... For instance, anger is often seen as an unacceptable emotion in our society, and one that is better left unsaid... but God does get angry and He has no problems with being vocal about it. The Bible also tells us that Christ was willing to sacrifice Himself for the joy set before Him. He had more than the discipline to obey His Father - He had a promise of joy after the sacrifice too. God, in His mighty wisdom, gave Jesus a joy (a desire) to motivate Him for what He was destined to do. Surely this emotional stuff must be a good idea.

It is His grace that He stirs up in us a desire for Him. It is His grace that the things of God make us happy. Hunger is a greater gift than food because He's given us the ability to get our own food, so anytime food is on the table it is at least partly because of our own efforts. (We should still be thankful for it, of course, and it is good that we are.) Hunger is different - you can't make yourself hungry. You can cultivate hunger, and you can inspire hunger, but there is absolutely nothing you can do to create or remove how much hunger you currently sense. Put it another way - if you had no food, you could go look for some. What could you do if you had no sense of hunger (even when you needed to eat)? You would be completely helpless. You might be able to survive for a few days out of habit and discipline, to simply eat when you figure you need to. But the joy in eating would be gone, as would the sense of satisfaction, and the desire to find food... and I would like to propose that you wouldn't last in the long run.

God has given us even more than the gift of Himself (which is more that we could ask for already!!); He's also given us the gift of wanting Him, of loving Him. It is this gift that we must treasure, cultivate, ask God for more of... and it is this gift that we must look out for in others. I don't mean to say that some in the world have the gift and some don't... I don't know about that one. But I just mean that we need to look for those pre-believers who are hungry, who sense a desire they don't understand, and we need to be sensitive to that desire and seek to speak to it (or ask God to). Because ultimately, it is their hearts they need to give to God, not their minds, and God leads them to that place of surrendering their hearts by speaking to their hearts too. If we don't know how to be sensitive to their hearts, then perhaps we just need to let Him speak to ours a little more.

These few days, when I say grace at meals, I've been trying to thank God not just for the food, but for my hunger and the satisfaction that the food brings. It's still a new and slightly uncomfortable concept for me. But I think it is an apt parallel to thank Him not just for the things of the spirit, but to thank Him that Godly things make me happy and that He's given me a desire for more of them.


This relates to another thought I had some time ago. The physical perfections of the universe, the fine tuning of the chemistry of life and the gravitational constant and all those things... to some people these point to intelligent design, but to others they simply point to the fact that we are on the other side of random chance - if a million universes existed but only one was capable of life, that universe would naturally be the only one we see. I get that. But to me, there is absolutely no reason why those life beings should find beauty in that same universe. Why should these creatures of chance revel in the moving colours of a sunset, or have their heart leap in awe at mountains, or feel like the stars speak to them of something greater? Why should they even be happy or sad at all? Maybe there are atheistic reasons proposed for that too... but my point is just that I think it is much harder to explain our sense of beauty and how it matches with how things really are, than it is to explain the science behind why we are alive.

Our sense of beauty testifies to His sense of beauty. It is that love for colour, aesthetics, grace and kindness, deposited into every human heart, that gives us a hint that we are all linked to our common Creator and meant to be with Him. For it is He, clothed in rainbows and painter of every sunrise and sunset, who is the epitomy of all beauty and all that makes our hearts sing. He is kind, gentle, strong, beautiful, joyful, just, compassionate and patient... traits that make hearts from tribes and nations all around the earth leap with joy.

He is, unquestionably, the desire of every nation and every people.

Woot.