None Of It Was What I Was Hungry For

Somebody gave her a list once, and she has never got over how flat it made her feel.

It was a good list, by the lights of the person who wrote it. What happens when the heavens open over a life. Favor. Increase. Doors opening. Influence. Provision. Things lining up.

She read it twice, sitting on her own porch, and what she felt was nothing at all, and then, underneath the nothing, something that felt uncomfortably close to disappointment.

Which frightened her a bit. Because if that is what an open heaven is for, and none of it lands in her, then either the list is wrong or she is, and she has spent a long time assuming it must be her.

She has never said this to a soul. In the circles she moves in, saying that favor and increase leave you cold sounds either ungrateful or superior, and she is neither. She is just a woman who is hungry for something she has never seen written on anybody's list.

If you read a list like that and felt nothing, come and sit on the step with me. Nobody who wrote yours is going to be named, and neither is your hunger going to be diagnosed.

The flatness is not ingratitude

Let us take that first, because it has been sitting on the porch for a while now.

Feeling nothing at a list of good things is not a mark against a person. It is usually a signal that the list was assembled from outcomes, and outcomes are not what hunger is made of. Nobody is ever hungry for a category.

The person who wrote it was not lying. They put down what they had seen God do, which is a fair thing to do. It only goes wrong when a list of effects gets handed to somebody as the definition of what heaven is for.

You are not ungrateful, and nothing about that flatness is a fault in you. I am not saying it to be kind. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is God knowing what a person is actually made of rather than expecting them to run on inventory, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold on a porch on an ordinary afternoon.

What He said He was

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a better list.

There is a crowd who have just been fed with bread out of nowhere, and they come back the next day wanting the same again, and Jesus says something that must have been very hard to hear.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger.John 6:35

He does not offer them more bread. He tells them what came down, and the answer is Himself. Read the argument He makes just before it: your fathers ate manna in the wilderness, and He goes on to say the true bread is the one who comes down out of heaven, which shifts the whole conversation from a substance to a Person.

That is the pattern everywhere. Rain came on ground that had gone hard. Bread came on a desert floor. A word came to a man with none left. The Spirit came down over a river. The Son came down over a stable. It ends in a Person every time.

You have been hungry for a Person and you were right to be, and the Word says plainly that He is what came down. That is written and preserved as His own claim about Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it register in a woman who has been quietly wondering whether she was broken.

The things on the list are still good

Something has to be said before you overcorrect, because by Thursday you will feel obliged to want nothing practical at all, and that is just another way of getting your own life wrong.

Provision is good. Open doors are good. God gives those and He is not ashamed of it.

You have permission to want them and permission not to be filled by them, both at once. Scripture says he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness (Psalm 107:9), where the satisfying is His own doing and the goodness is Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been feeding you all along in a way that never once appeared on anybody's inventory.

And if the last while has cost more than anybody around this porch 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.