In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins his teaching with a series of nine beatitudes. The fourth beatitude in that series declares, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled”. (Matthew 5:6-NIV). As I listened to Pat talk about her experience, I found myself thinking those who have so little tend to take God more seriously than those who appear to have so much. I have already indicated that most of those attending the seminar are living very near or in poverty. But they were driven, even compelled by a hunger and thirst that had to do with more than food and/or water. They were possessed by a passion to know God. They were driven by the desire to be connected with the Almighty. They had what someone called an irresistible urge for a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the God who is the Creator, the Sustainer and the Keeper of all life. And because of this hunger and thirst, they moved with an unrelenting passion to be present at this seminar where their souls could be fed, where the thirst of their spirits could be quenched, and where they could find deeper meaning and greater abundance in their lives.
It is rather strange to think that there is something blessed about hunger and thirst. However, it is not so such the hunger and thirst that is blessed; it is simply that hunger and thirst drive us to have our need fulfilled. Maybe this is one of the lessons we can learn from losing the things we think are important and necessary in our lives but in reality may not be. In his book, Searching for God in Godforsaken Times and Places, Hubert G. Locke writes, “Groping for God is what we find we must do, after we have discovered that nothing else in this world is worth the effort”. While we who have much spend much of our time trying to get more, maybe it is in the loss of some of what we have that we discover what those who have so little seem to already know: that our real longing and our real yearning is for God.
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