Encouragement

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Starved? Thirsty?
© 2008

by

Stephen A. Peterson


To avoid capture by a group of foreign fighters who had filtered their way into Iraq, Marine Corporal Nadia Murphy roamed seemingly without direction in the Iraqi countryside to avoid capture. For fifty-three days, Corporal Murphy survived until she was spotted and received by a helicopter of the United States military out searching to find her.

“I was so hungry,” she told the Navy psychologist, “that I ate whatever live insects I could get my hands on, consumed grass, and drank muddy water I strained through a handkerchief to satisfy my thirst”. Only her strong faith, she admitted, kept the young Marine from losing hope that she could survive to be found in a combat situation.

Few people in the industrialize world know what it is like to go without food or something to drink for long periods of time. Those who are told of a person having to eat something repulsive to them or described being so hungry and thirsty that they would be reduced to such action is an unimagined bad dream. A bad dream wherein one might hear a person say, “I would never, ever do such things no matter how bad off the situation was”.

Similarly, there are so many biologically living people (often referred to as the “walking dead”) walking about with unfulfilled spiritual hunger and thirst—a deficiency that for some last a lifetime however long. Some bounce from one religious or intellectual experience to another without any degree of satisfaction to speak of. They easily fall into addictive lifestyles (food, substances, sexual promiscuity, things) where the profane become sacred. Why? Some people are without light, without awareness that a relationship with God will satisfy their longings. Others have intellectually rejected God as a source of help due to spiritual blindness and outright human arrogance.

What does it take to change the attitude of these people? The answer in every situation is an intense need that often results from some traumatic experience or when the person is broken and, as it is said, “hits bottom’ in their personal life. It is when he or she is helpless and in great need that Christ is most real. The greatest of Christian stories of ordinary men and women who attained their Christian faith have generally experienced such a need as Christ expressed in His beatitude: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness; for they will be filled”. (Matthew 5:6).

If you feel spiritually hungry and/or thirsty or if someone known to you is so, note Christ’s condition for being filled is a hunger and thirst for righteousness that is spiritual. In other words, a person must want Him intensely with her or his entire being—body, mind and soul to be filled or satisfied. A half-hearted attempt or a religious experience will result in unfulfillment and emotional confusion and loss.

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