I Could Not Manufacture Hunger

The word he was given was hunger. God moves where there is hunger.

He believed it, and he still half believes it, and that is the trouble. It sounds true. It sounds like the kind of thing that ought to be true.

So he tried to be hungry. That is the sentence he cannot say out loud without hearing how strange it is. He tried to want more, on purpose, in a measurable way, and he read about people who wept for hours and he sat in his own room and felt approximately what he always feels, which is a steady, ordinary, undramatic affection for God and a great deal of tiredness.

And every time nothing happened, the diagnosis was ready made: not hungry enough.

The worst part is what it did to the ordinary affection. He started to distrust it. A quiet love for God began to look like evidence against him, and there is no way out of that from the inside, because trying harder to feel is the one thing that guarantees you will feel nothing.

If somebody handed you a condition like that, come and sit down in the courtyard. Nobody who taught it to you is going to be named or mocked here, and neither are you.

They were describing weather, not machinery

Let us begin with the people who gave it to you, because you will not hear anything else while you think I am about to attack them.

They were not liars. They had known a season when they wanted God badly and something happened, and they told you about the wanting because the wanting was what they could see. It is the most natural mistake a person can make: describing the weather they were standing in as though it were the machinery that made it.

Their hunger was real. The conversion of it into a requirement is the part that quietly went wrong, and it usually goes wrong in transit rather than in the heart of the one who first said it.

You are not standing outside anything because of what you can or cannot feel. Nothing in your emotional weather has ever set God's disposition toward you. I am not offering my own reassurance here. The written word says that he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), which locates the acceptance in Christ and not in the intensity of the one accepted, and the Holy Spirit holds that steady in a man sitting in a quiet room feeling nothing dramatic at all.

The invitation Scripture actually issues

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a method for getting hungrier.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat.Isaiah 55:1

Read who is called. Everyone who thirsts, yes. And then, immediately, the one who has nothing to bring. The invitation is deliberately built so that the person with empty hands is named in the same breath as the person with appetite, and the whole passage goes on to ask why anybody would spend what they have on what does not satisfy.

That is God addressing the person who has nothing to offer, by name, first.

You are invited exactly as you are, with the appetite you actually have and not the one you were told to produce. The Word never once made the size of a hunger the ticket. That is written down and left there deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has been trying to feel something on command.

What to put where the condition was

Something has to fill the space, or a subtler condition will move in by the weekend. It always does. Sincerity, or desperation, or the right posture, or really meaning it this time.

So let us be plain about what is actually in that space.

You have God's attention already, and it is not a variable. What you are receiving is a Person who has turned toward you, and the turning happened before you felt anything at all. Scripture says that we love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19), where first is the whole argument and it is entirely on His side, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has been carrying every ordinary, undramatic, tired prayer you have prayed as though it were the same as anybody's tears.

And if the trying has cost you more than anyone around the table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.