Still Hungry?

If you’ve ever spent a day at the beach with seagulls circling overhead, chances are you’ve formed a few opinions about them.

They were created to find what they need along the shoreline: fish, crabs, shellfish, insects, and the other things their bodies were designed to eat.

But somewhere along the way, they discovered French fries.

And pizza.

And chips.

And pretty much anything sitting unattended beside a beach chair, or attended.

Now, instead of simply searching the shoreline, some of them hover over people. They watch. They wait. And the second someone turns their head, they swoop in and grab whatever they can get.

The interesting thing is that food may fill them for a moment, but it doesn’t truly nourish them.

A french fry here and there probably isn’t going to hurt a gull. But when human food becomes a regular part of their diet, it can create problems. Foods high in salt, fat, and processed ingredients don’t provide the nutrition their bodies were created to need.

And the more they get fed by people, the more their behavior changes.

They stop looking for what naturally nourishes them and start chasing what’s easy to grab.

Watching them makes me wonder how often we do the same thing.

God created us with deep desires for love, significance, belonging, purpose, peace, and joy.

Those desires aren’t wrong.

Those desires were ultimately designed to lead us into relationship with the One who created us.

We reach for success.

Approval.

Money.

Relationships.

Possessions.

Attention.

Experiences.

Even ministry.

And none of those things are necessarily bad. Many of them are gifts from God.

But a gift from God can never replace a relationship with God.

We can keep asking Him for more- more success, more opportunity, more blessing, more answers- and still feel empty because what our souls ultimately need isn’t more of what God can give us.

We need God Himself.

Jesus said:

“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry.” John 6:35

Notice He didn’t say, “I’ll give you something that will satisfy you.”

He said, “I am.”

Maybe our problem isn’t that we’re hungry.

Maybe it’s that we keep eating the wrong things.

A seagull can fill itself with French fries and still not receive what its body was created to need.

And you and I can fill our lives with accomplishments, experiences, possessions, relationships, busyness, and the approval of people and still wonder why something inside us feels empty.

Because our souls weren’t created to be filled by those things.

They were created to be filled through relationship with God.

Maybe the emptiness we sometimes feel isn’t something to immediately escape. Maybe it’s revealing something. Our hunger is reminding us where we were always meant to come to be fed.

Jeremiah describes it this way in Jeremiah 2:13:

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

That verse hits differently when you think about it.

God doesn’t simply say they chose the wrong water.

They walked away from Him, the Source.

We keep drinking from broken cisterns and wondering why we’re still thirsty.

And there’s another interesting part to the seagulls around town.

Falcons are sometimes brought in as natural predators to discourage the gulls from hanging around people and stealing their food.

At first, that sounds harsh.

But watching it made me think about the things God sometimes allows into our lives that make us uncomfortable enough to move.

A closed door.

A disappointment.

Something we depended on suddenly disappearing.

A season when what used to satisfy us doesn’t anymore.

Maybe not every disruption is punishment.

Sometimes discomfort exposes what we’ve been depending on to satisfy a hunger only God can fill.

Hebrews 12 reminds us that God disciplines those He loves. His correction isn’t rejection. It’s the loving work of a Father leading His children toward what is good and ultimately, drawing us back to Himself.

Maybe some of the things we keep asking God to remove are actually causing us to look up and realize how far we’ve wandered from the One my soul really needs.

David in Psalms 63:1 understood this:

“You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you…”

David wasn’t simply thirsty for something from God.

He was thirsty for God.

That’s the hunger beneath all our other hungers.

The world has plenty of French fries to offer.

They taste good.

They’re easy to grab.

They satisfy for a moment.

And they’ll keep us coming back for more.

But they can never fill the place in us that was created for a relationship with God. So maybe the question isn’t:

“Why am I still hungry?”

Maybe the better question is:

“What have I been feeding on?”

Because ultimately, our deepest hunger isn’t for something.

It’s for Someone.

And Jesus never promised that everything around us would satisfy us.

He said He would.