Remember When You Were Hungry?

“Do you remember when you were hungry?”

The question came out of the blue. Right in the middle of a conversation we were having. No lead up to it at all. Nothing to give the reason for that question to pop up. He just blurted out the question and I wanted to see where he was coming from.

“I mean do you remember that time when it was the hunger that drove you to seek something to satisfy. It was as though there was a fire burning underneath you and the fierce heat of it would not be in any way quenched unless you got what you were looking for. It’s almost like you were desperate because there was something you were yearning for and until that hunger was satiated you would be relentless. That’s what the hunger would do for you.”

I was taken up with what he was saying and I gave him room to keep going.

“Then something happened along the way. Whether it was the responsibility of employment, the responsibility of an intimate relationship or the overall responsibility of growing up as we were told. Something happened and it was so much that the hunger was satiated, it was as if that hunger wasn’t allowed to take prominence any more. We were in essence told to cool it. So we cooled it. We did our work, we were diligent at it. We raised the family, we were diligent at it – kinda. We toed the line of being responsible law-abiding citizens contributing to our community.”

He knew he could keep going, I wasn’t going to stop him while he was on a roll.

“All this happening and yet from time to time we had hints that the hunger we suppressed still needs to be dealt with. When the children ask the awkward questions, as they struggle with their own identity. When that particular news report jarred with the sense of how life was meant to be. All of those and more were tugs at the conscience that the hunger remained and could be eating away at us despite all the respectability we had accrued.”

At those words he crumpled into his seat and I understood where he was coming from.

The beauty of getting into something or someone you love is their capacity to make you feel in some sense fulfilled.

When you’re in their company, they fill your world and you are completely satisfied with them at that time. Whether it’s an activity that takes up your entire attention or it’s that friend that livens up that conversation to some degree it is fulfilling.

My friend was nudging at the gnawing sense that it was not enough to toe the line, to tick the boxes of respectability unless we addressed what life could be like if we sought to fill the hunger. Filling that hunger was not about entertainment, leisure activities and noble causes. It is so much more than that.

So much more …

(Photo by Andres Medecigo on Unsplash)

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden