Our culture loves to call people “driven”. The word gets thrown around as if it were a compliment, and most of us are flattered by it the first few times. Then, somewhere in the middle of an exhausted year, you start to notice the word’s edges. Driven by what, exactly? And to where? “Driven” implies something is pushing you. After a while, you start to wonder if you’d rather be pulled instead.
I’ve been called driven plenty of times. The truth is, what I feel most days isn’t a drive. It’s a hunger.
I’m hungry for more of Jesus in my life. I’m hungry for more of his purpose in what I do. And I’m hungry to see both of those things actually affect the world I’m part of. That hunger doesn’t push me. It pulls me. There’s a real difference.
The wilderness moment
There’s a period in Jesus’s life that I think about a lot. After he was baptised, before his public ministry began, he spent forty days fasting in the desert. The devil came to tempt him three times. He refused all three. Then the devil left, and Jesus walked back into the world to begin everything he had come to do.
Only two of the four Gospel writers mention his hunger directly.
“And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.” (Matthew 4:2)
“And when they were ended, he was hungry.” (Luke 4:2)
What strikes me is the placement. This stretch of trial and hunger sits between his calling and his ministry. Not before the call. Not after the work. Right in the middle, in that strange waiting space where most of us are tempted to fill the silence with distraction.
The hunger wasn’t a problem in the story. It was part of the formation.
Why hunger matters
Physical and spiritual hunger work in interestingly similar ways.
Physically, hunger goes down when you eat. It also goes down, oddly, after a few days of fasting, when the body shifts gears. Either way, the body has its own logic.
Spiritually, hunger works to a parallel pattern. When we’re well fed, regularly meeting God in prayer, in scripture, in community, the hunger is satisfied in healthy ways. When we go a long time without any of those things, something different happens. The hunger doesn’t get sharper. It gets quieter. We stop noticing it. Complacency moves in. We can go weeks or months without thinking we’re starving, while we are.
Hunger is a reminder that we need to eat. The dangerous moment is when we stop feeling it at all.
Pascal’s hunger
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and physicist, was famously hungry for God. He’s the one who gave us Pascal’s Wager, the argument that if God doesn’t exist, you lose nothing by believing, but if he does, the cost of not believing is enormous.
He’s also the one who said “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”
I find that line unbelievably refreshing. Pascal was one of the great minds of his age, and he understood, better than most, that the deepest things in life can’t be reasoned all the way to the bottom. There are truths you only meet by hunger, not by argument.
Six questions worth asking
If you take hunger seriously, a few questions tend to surface.
- How hungry am I, honestly?
- How do I feed myself? Where, when, and how regularly?
- If I’ve lost the hunger, how do I find my way back to it?
- How am I feeding the people around me, not just myself?
- People in my world are hungry for hope. Who are they, and where are they?
- What would it look like to feed them, in real ways, this week?
These aren’t quick questions. They reward sitting with.
Finally
Paul, writing to the Philippians from a prison cell, lands a line that makes the whole thing easier to carry.
“I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.” (Philippians 4:12)
The hunger doesn’t always go away. The trick is learning how to live well in either state, fed or unfed, abundant or running on fumes, and trusting that the source of strength doesn’t depend on how full your plate happens to be that day.
Hungry is not a weakness. It might be the most useful thing you carry.
So if you stopped right now and checked, how hungry are you really, and where have you been going to feed yourself when you remember to?