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A distracted mother was complaining to her doctor: "There must be something wrong with my children - they won't eat". The doctor, who knew the family history well, examined the children and then said to the over-anxious mother "Don't worry.They'll eat when they are hungry.". In that particular family it was a simple yet profound word. When you are really hungry you don't have time for fads and fancies. Like spoiled children who push away their plates crying "Don't like vegetables - can't stand fish" or "I hate puddings, yuk!" Let them have a taste of real hunger and their fussiness will disappear like magic. There were some foods I didn't like till I went in the army, when it was either that or nothing: I chose that!
My father who was a stretcher bearer in the trenches of the 1st World War says that the best meal he ever had was when he was starving one day and found a crust of bread, put it for a few seconds on the coke fire to toast and sterilise it, and then he devoured it. "It was delicious" he told me one day when, as a child, I was moaning about eating crusts. Of course it wasn't the best meal he'd ever eaten - it was the one he remembered because he was starving at the time. Anything then would have been a feast.
C. H. Spurgeon once said "Hunger finds no fault in the cook".
Jesus of Nazareth once said an amazing thing about both being hungry and being too well fed - it was socially a revolution - and by the way don't spiritualise it to death. Are you ready?
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied .....Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry ......Luke 6: 21a and 25a
Here he is teaching his followers that you can be so well fed, or aim to be, so contented, so rich, so popular, so at home in this world, that you never begin to learn that your life is more, much more than any of these things. You are not here on earth only to be satisfied and happy.
Do you wonder that they did not understand Jesus when he said:
For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
"Sir", they said, "from now on give us this bread." John 6:33-34
Perhaps today we should all ponder the words from the Sermon on the Mount we all know so well that we forget them
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Matthew 5:6a
A Prayer:
Thank you Father for food and drink and healthy appetites, and thank you that I need more than bread to feed my emptiness - even Jesus, the true Bread of Heaven.
Now read Matthew 25:31-46.
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