I Am Satisfied

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

—John 6:35

Food is his obsession.

He wakes up thinking about food. Goes to sleep thinking about food. And the majority of his conversations and compulsions in the hours between center on the subject of—yes—food.

He’s eight years old. And there’s one simple reason for his food obsession: he knows what it feels like to be hungry.

That’s why he eats his dinner in about four minutes flat. That’s why he swallows steak whole, without chewing or tasting it. That’s why he sneaks into the kitchen when he thinks we’re not looking to stuff cookies in his pockets or crackers in his cheeks. When snacks are distributed at church or school, he doesn’t take just one like the other children. He grabs five or six, eating as many as he can and stashing extra for later.

Just in case.

Just in case he doesn’t have food again for a very long time.

Rest assured we feed our youngest son plenty. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t get three squares and a couple of snacks. He does not go without, ever. He eats more than I do. Twice over.

Our son’s food obsession began long before he joined our family at four years old. There’s a hard history driving his behavior. We know this. But it doesn’t make it any easier to wrestle daily with his never-satisfied stomach. No matter how many meals and helpings and snacks we serve up, it’s never, ever enough.

You see, hunger doesn’t drive him. Fear does.

When you spend the first four years of your life going hungry, you end up a little obsessed with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It makes sense. Otherwise you might go without.

How about the rest of us? What’s our excuse? Most of us don’t have the same obsession with food as my eight-year-old son (although, I confess I’ve been known to tear the house apart looking for a Reese’s). Our preoccupation with satisfaction isn’t any less dangerous, however.

Consider the woman who works out at the gym hours every week and runs dozens of miles day after day because her body never looks quite trim enough.

Or the man who spends sixty-plus hours a week at the office, to the detriment of his health and family, because he believes the next promotion will finally prove his worth.

And let’s not even mention the individual who can’t stop shopping and spending and filling her house and closet with the next new thing.

There’s nothing wrong with working out, working hard, or dressing nice. That’s not the point. Just as food isn’t the point for our boy either.

The point is—or rather the question is—what’s driving our behavior?

Ultimately, we’re searching for something. We want to believe we’re sufficiently beautiful, adequately successful. We want satisfaction. That’s why we drive ourselves so hard, because we believe if we could just have one more plateful, we’d finally be full.

There’s a flaw in that philosophy, however. All our pursuits and passions are merely temporary fixes. That’s why today’s four-mile run doesn’t carry over to tomorrow. And this week’s job promotion doesn’t mean you won’t have to work just as hard for the next one. And that new dress quickly becomes the old dress, buried and forgotten in the back of your closet.

Sure, it feels good for a moment. But an hour or two later, you’re hungry all over again. A good breakfast always gives way to a need for lunch.

Yet we don’t have to live hungry, obsessing over the next meal. We can finally reach a place where we’re no longer afraid of going without. And that happens only when we find a food source that never ends.

To a group of Israelites wandering in the wilderness, God provided the answer. Hungry and afraid, they griped and complained and contemplated returning to their food-deprived slavery. “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Ex. 16:3).

If only I could have what she’s having.

If only I could have seconds. Or thirds.

If only . . . if only . . . if only.

God addresses the real need, not their imagined need. They didn’t need more food; they needed to trust the one who served it. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10).

Not a promise of literal food, although I’ve known God to provide a meal when times were tight. Rather, a promise of Himself, to satisfy the deeper hunger.

How beautiful—how perfectly beautiful—that Jesus would give Himself a name our starving souls can understand: “I am the bread of life.”

The Bread of Life. The only one who can fill what we lack. The only place my boy and I will ever be satisfied.

Go ahead. Run a few miles. Give your best to your job. Buy yourself a new dress or serve up a second helping, if you’d like. But don’t, for a second, fool yourself into thinking the pleasure of these lesser plates will last. It’s nothing more than a snack, a temporary fix to a forever hunger.

Instead, feast on the Bread of Life, and you will always, always be full.

In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest . . . the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.

—BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR, AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD