I'm hungry.

I hear those words all day long!  My five and a half year old son often eats three or four slices of pizza and more than one helping of salad.  My three year old isn't far behind.  The baby, who is just a little over a year, has been known to pack away four pancakes.  All three of them seem to be bottomless pits.  I shudder to think about our grocery bills in a few years, and don't even get me started on the teen years!

My middle son has recently begun saying, "Mommy, I'm huuuunnngry!"

"That's nice.  I'm 'Mommy.'"

"No, mommy.  I'm huuuuunnnngry for some food."

"Nice to meet you, hungry."

(The light suddenly turns on.)  "Mommy, can I have a snack?"

"Yes, you may.  What would you like?"

"You can guess."

At this point, I run through the litany of usual choices.  Carrots and dip?  An apple?  Wheat crackers and cheese?  Applesauce?  Graham crackers?  Yogurt?  A slice of banana bread?  At some point, he usually chooses one (or two or three) of the options presented and happily munches his snack, creating a swath of crumbs around several chairs at the dining room table.  (It is apparently too much pressure to expect a three year old boy to commit to one chair while eating a snack.)

I've been feeling hungry lately, too.  (Not so much in the physical sense, since I'm pretty adept at polishing off both my dinner and an almost nightly bowl of ice cream.)  The problem has been finding something that satisfies my spiritual hunger.  I know what should satisfy, but I often remain hungry after reading my Bible.  I grew up in a Christian home, spent (and still spend) a good deal of time in church, attended Christian elementary and middle school and a Christian college, so most of the Bible is quite familiar.  I wonder if it has become too familiar?

Let me be clear: I am in NO WAY advocating that the Bible is anything less than the inerrant word of God.  I am also not implying that it is possible to know too much about the Bible.  I just wonder if I've let it become a familiar book rather than the written Word it was intended to be.  The problem isn't that God doesn't speak through His Word - it must be a reception issue on my end. 

I have a feeling that my problem stems from my academic approach.  I've always been a voracious reader and have a pretty good  long-term memory.  I was pretty much a straight-A student through high school and graduated with honors from a university where the majority of students were in the top ten percent of their high school graduating class.  Ask me to recite the Gettysburg address, which I memorized in eighth grade, and I can rattle off a good portion of it.  I can also recite probably hundreds of Bible verses which I memorized as a child in AWANA. While 'hiding God's word in my heart' was certainly beneficial, I wonder if the "read and report" mentality I adopted has exaggerated the disconnect between comprehension and application. 

I'd be willing to bet that I'm not alone.  I'd be willing to bet that there are countless Christians out there like me who struggle with the sin of overconfidence.  "Yes, I know that.  Yes, I have that verse memorized.  Yes, I've heard eighteen sermons preached on that passage and have read three books about that topic."  I desperately don't want to become what I hate - an empty, hollow, hungry soul with a happy, smiley, Jesus-loves-me, Sunday school face painted across the facade.  If I'm not mistaken, during His time on Earth Jesus was acquainted with quite a few people matching a similar description and He wasn't too fond of them.

It's not enough to simply know what He says.  It's no longer enough to know what Jesus would do in any given situation.  "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."  (1 Corinthians 13:11, NIV)  Now that I'm an adult and I know it's not enough, it's time for a new approach.  Time to go back to the drawing board.  While knowledge of God must be based in His inerrant word, how do I interact with God?  How do I get His truth and His life and His character so deeply ingrained in me that it moves beyond knowledge and becomes part of my reflexes? 

I don't know the answers yet, but I want to find out how I can become hungry to become more hungry - not just for knowledge of Him but for Him.