THE TETHERING PLACE

I met with the wonderful Mary {counselor/professor/spiritual-adviser} today, I as I do every Wednesday. It is one of my favorite hours in my week as I get to sit, breathe, remember, unpack the lovely chaos that is life, and look forward with hope and a plan…

Today, just before our time was to come to a close, Mary shared a story of when she went to India to teach the bible to a group of women in a little church. These women were hungry. Hungry for the word to the point of husbands breaking their hands so they would stop reading their bibles hungry. And Mary shared about praying for this one particular woman and watching her hand be healed by the living God, and while there was great hope and a miracle at hand, the healing was also met with great sadness in her, as she acknowledged that woman would surely return to the same home only to perhaps have the same hand be broken again.

And we talked of how, here, with our first world problems and our first world comforts, we experience first world hunger. We are satisfied far too easily. Our schedules and our bellies are full, crowding out our emaciated spirits. And tears sprung up from a deep place where I know I want more, where I am terrified of being too easily satisfied by a God that wants to offer me abundantly more than the morsels I have tasted.

My husband and I sometimes dream of going to far off places and experiencing a dependence on the Lord we know is foreign to our present circumstances. And yet whenever I speak aloud that I just want to “go somewhere”, something does not sit right in me as I know I, WE are called HERE. I don’t doubt that we might venture to some far off place at some point to connect and learn, to serve and love, to bring back the hunger I know we would observe in other worlds.

But for now, I want to pray the prayer that Mary shared with me…I pray that I might be a person who is grateful for my first world problems and my first world comforts, but that I would retain a third world hunger for the God that heals and raises from the dead and makes all things new.

There are days, I confess, when I feel full, when my hunger is dulled by busyness and life. But today, I am hungry. So very hungry for the spirit of God to fill and lead and do things that maybe to most seem a little crazy, a little irresponsible, a lot supernatural. And I’m praying this hunger doesn’t leave me until the day I meet Him face to face.