Starving

Many days I feel like I am spiritually hungry. Starving even. My heart is growling with longing for fullness. How then do I go about filling up this empty feeling? I begin to find things to fill me up.I work to be filled by being busy. Filled with petty disturbances like unfinished homework and dirty socks on the floor. Filled with jealousies , resentments both old and new. Filled with sadness over past and worries about the future. Filled with the desire to work out the perfect schedule or the best way to organize the house and are lives. If I can fill up my heart and mind,then I can avoid the true nature of my hunger, my longing. I tell myself everything will be fine. I can if I just figure things out. Fix it all. Then I can be happy and content. Full.

And yet, this kind of fullness, gorging on the craziness of pursuing peace by my own means, leads to mental confusion, emotional dullness, even more spiritiually hunger. Like the person who is eats all day but is nutritionally undernourished, I am overfed on the stuff of this world, and underfed by not partaking of spiritual food, the Eucharist and the Word.

Lord, let me recognize my hunger is for you. You have designed us perfectly to be hungry when our bodies need energy and sustenanace. Teach me to rely on you and your holy people, your beloved Church, the sacraments...to be filled with the blessings and graces I need to be a child of yours, living here on this day, because you deemed it so.

I know in my heart you are a loving Father and would never let a child of yours go hungry. Thank you for loving me, for giving me the gift of your Son, the Word made flesh, so that we might live, fully and full of you.

Thank you for this gift of hunger and longing that to my last breath, I will always need you and want you. For in the beginning and in the end, there is only you.

Praise be to God!