Reframe: From The God We've Made…To God With UsSampel

Reframing Starvation

Hunger drives nearly everything we do. Anger, power, revenge, love, and even faith are driven by the same single thing: hunger. Our lives are in the shape they are in because of the way we choose to fill our hunger. And at the center of it all is the longing of the soul. We may not articulate it in these terms or acknowledge the longing at all, but denying it won’t change it. This is how we are made. The emptiness we often feel in life and the craving that lingers at the heart of us is a deep longing for meaning waiting to be filled. And there is no way to get there without a living, breathing, moment-by-moment, collaborative connection to the source of life itself.

A starving person will eat just about anything—shoe leather, dirt mixed with rotten flesh, anything that will provide even the illusion of nourishment. And we will do the same spiritually, even though we might not realize what we’re doing. We’re all starving for life because we’re made to have it. And life can only be found the way it was designed—in collaboration with God.

We’d all agree that sustenance is desperately needed for a malnourished and wasted body. Once a body has burned away its fat stores and consumed all its muscle tissue, the vital organs are the only things left to turn into fuel. A body will sustain life as long as it can, but there comes a point when, without nutrition, the starving body will shut down. Life will end, leaving behind an emaciated corpse.

Although we accept this as biological fact, it’s remarkable how easily we ignore the spiritual implications. Like our physical bodies, our spirits also need nutrition.

In our marketing-driven society we’re told that any given product or service we buy will fill our hunger. It’s so pervasive that, without realizing it, we can even become consumers when it comes to our relationships.

God isn’t a product that can fill us any more than our husbands or wives are. When we attempt to use Him this way it doesn’t work because we’re using Him. You may have experienced a relationship in your life in which you felt used. Likely you are not still involved in that relationship, and you probably don’t have fond memories of it. We can’t be users in our relationship with God any more than we can successfully foster a life-giving relationship with another person by using and consuming them.