A Prayer of Depravity

“Feed the hungry,” He says.

And then again. “Feed My sheep.”

But this time He speaks with authority.

It’s a prayer I’ve been having lately, a dangerous prayer, because even at my hungriest I have not a clue.

The last time God sent a famine, it lasted four hundred years. A famine of faith, of favor. The thing that set His people apart was the thing He withdrew.

God stepped back. For four hundred years.

It was the cry of the depraved, the certainty that it was all just a dream, that surely God had forgotten and forsaken; the very full feeling of being left completely empty; the trigger for God to whisper, “Finally.”

And the Feast that came when He broke that silence.

My eyes have seen Your salvation,
which You have prepared in the sight of all nations:
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and the glory for Your people Israel.
Luke 2.30-32

A Feast for all nations. For those whose hunger had grown desperate, anxious; for those whose hunger had numbed them; for those whose hunger had prepared them, delivered them, for the fullness of God. Of God.

So I pray recklessly, subconsciously. Without fully understanding the consequences, I invite a famine knowing only that the feast to come will surely consume me.

But at the same time I am timid as I pray, curious and careful, knowing on one hand — though my knowing is incomplete — that God delivers faithfully, all while clutching my doubt in the other.

It is the doubt that wins me over, insecurity bred within the sadly unfamiliar taste of God’s fullness.

With apprehension and hope that He forgives the faint-hearted, I wait for the hunger.