Soul Food

BEFORE WORK OR WHATEVER it is that obligates our time after waking, we eat, even if we ate six to nine hours before. Before bed we eat to cease the hunger. After the risen sun and early yawn, we do the same. This is science. Biological. Human. Fuel is a perpetual need to which our bodies would break if kept from it. On those spiritual days when we fast, withholding food from the body, we taste what starvation does to us. The mind twists and turns. Our emotions sway and, if turned in the wrong direction, tempt us to burn everything to the ground. Monday through Sunday we are largely controlled by our stomachs and if anything is in it. So much so that its contents determine if we will be a Monster or a Mercy.

I don’t find it odd, then, that our Lord uses food as a metaphor for Himself. The most memorable being that of bread. The whole subject began when Jesus told Israel the Father has bread to give them that is true (John 6:32). Figuring that Jesus’s preaching about bread must mean He had access to a better manna, they heard this and contemplated a different miracle. One of constant sustenance. “Sir, give us this bread always,” they said (John 6:34). Always. They supposed Jesus was offering to fill their belly and not their soul. With a product made of wheat, planted in the soil, grown from the ground, harvested by human hands. That might’ve been bread, but that bread was not the better manna. The true bread was and is Jesus, He who said, “I am the bread of life” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:35, 51).

You may be wondering where I am going by saying all of this. Wondering how my original point connects to my most recent, and it is this: in the same way our bodies need a constant diet of food, our souls need God like this always. Upon waking, we are hungry for heaven, and yet we fill it with a scroll or many. As the day moves forward and the belly still empty, we fill it again, when a person gives us a measure of love, a like, a look. Before bed, the soul, if visible, would be skeletal. Barely able to stand on its own or smile with all of its teeth. The body who holds this almost-dead thing feels alive because it depends on every other bread except the One the Father sent.

But the Lord’s Table has been set, so sit. Revive yourself in His life. Fill yourself in His love. Scrape the plate and wipe it clean. We need the Bread of heaven because truly no other food will do.