The hungry Years (part 1)

Most of us go through times of tightness and inflexibility. We feel trapped and constrained, then frustrated, depressed or angry. I call this period the hungry years. It may be in our finances, career, love life, or physical health.

I had my own hungry years.

I was accusing God of being stingy, like a billionaire who hands me a bowl of bland porridge when he could have treated me to a sumptuous buffet. But one day I came across a line that changed my thinking. “[God] humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna…” (Deuteronomy 8:3).

Wait a minute. God causing you to hunger?

​I thought that when God blesses us, we are filled, happy or even carefree. But the more I thought about this sentence – given to the people of Israel after wandering through the desert for forty years – the more I realized that God’s blessings do not always mean that He makes us comfortable.

Put differently, suffering does not necessarily mean that one has lost God’s favor. In fact, there are blessings that God can only give us through hunger. Hunger can be an instrument in the hands of a God who knows perfectly what He is doing. We have to accept that God uses both the pleasant and the unpleasant, the famine as well as the feast, in a divinely ordained blend.

In what way can going through “hungry years” – times when our finances are tight and we wonder if we will ever prosper – serve to our benefit? We will explore this in my next blog post.

Photo by Lakerain Snake on Unsplash