DEVOTION
Commercials, magazines and consumer reports tell the story; Americans have a food obsession. Fresh or frozen, packaged or picked, volume or variety — one of the most basic human activities has become for many in the United States a potent fixation.
Meanwhile, many of the world’s people suffer from a far different sort of food anxiety. “From where will my next meal come,” asks the widowed mother. “How much will it cost?” “What must I give up in order to feed my children?”
To such a breadth of global food perspectives, God provides equally expansive responses. God examines more than our eating behaviors. God addresses our deeper appetites, and calls us towards an entirely different sort of hunger.
A hunger that desires affordable food for the neighbor before affordable fuel for the gas tank; a hunger that chooses to forfeit one meal in favor of sharing one offering; a hunger that requests micro-loans for strangers in Mali rather than marriage gifts for family in Missouri.
This is a radical type of hunger indeed, but in the face of our global food crisis, we need God’s chosen hunger more than ever. A hunger which calls us to look beyond the food on our plate, seeing the neighbor who sits at the table and tasting anew how each morsel consumed affects our life together.
It is this open-eyed hunger we have been called to feed. And for this hunger we have been freed by a banquet; unbound by our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has severed the ropes of sin and death, and shares at table his holy supper — the food which fulfills us, even as it fits us for the feast.
May this dinner guide our words and deeds, as we share God’s bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor home.
By Daniel Lee, LWR’s Communication Projects Coordinator
Fill the Bowl | Devotional
