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- 3 Types of Hunger for God
The first question that Jesus asks his disciples in the book of John is about hunger.
He turns to look at Andrew and Peter, sees them following Him, and asks:
“What are you looking for?”
Instead of first telling them what to do, he invites them to connect to their hunger, longing, and their ache.
For many of us, we enter prayer with a list of things we should do — read the Bible, sit in silence, intercede — instead of hearing Jesus’s invitation to get in touch with our longing. This is a deep truth that is key to building a prayer life:
We were made to long for God.
“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.”
God placed an unquenchable thirst in our hearts that is meant to serve as a compass to guide us to Him. The mere fact that nothing can satisfy us is actually a gift from God meant to drive us continually to His feet.
In some ways, sin can be understood as misdirected desire — we look to other things to satisfy us other than God. Perhaps this is what NT Wright means when he defines sin as a “failure of worship.”
Prayer, then, can be defined as creatively holding tension, longing, and hunger before God. It is the continual practice of turning from lesser things and directing our desires Godward.
This type of thinking is everywhere in the writings of the Mystics and is one of the reasons they devote their lives to seeking God in prayer.
I think that there are at least three types of hunger for God:
The Want to Want God
Even the desire to hunger for God when you do not already is a form of hunger. And, it is a gift! The dissatisfaction with our present level of longing for God is a gift that’s meant to unsettle us and drive us toward the discipline of prayer.
Dry Aching
Thomas Dubay’s brilliant survey of the prayer lives of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross describes a “dry, empty-feeling yearning” and an “arid but earnest desire” (68). This is the type of hunger for God where you can’t see or feel Him, yet you are reaching and longing for closeness with Him.
O God, you are my God; I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Loving Longing
Teresa describes this kind of hunger as “love yearnings of great vehemence” (Testimony 1, no. 13). This is the kind of hunger where you can feel God and yet you are aching for more of Him.
All hunger from God is a gift that is meant to invite us into prayer. Have you experienced any of these? The Mystics encourage us that all three of these types of hunger are normal in a quest to build a deep life with God — sometimes even on the same day.
Pray this today:
God, I thank you for the gift of hunger. I think thank you for the want to want to you. I thank you for the dry aching. I thank you for loving longing. Would you help me today to notice the longing in my heart for You, and to continue to look to You alone to satisfy the deepest longings of my heart?