Understanding Our Deepest Cravings
by Emily Jamieson
We are hungry, aren’t we? Hungry for food and drink, but also touch and attention, affirmation and significance, influence and purpose. We are hungry for laughter and adventure and thrill. Hungry for rest and silence and a reprieve from it all. Hungry for more. Hungry for less. Always hungry.
But how often are we satisfied?
How often are YOU satisfied?
I am talking about the deep down in your gut kind of satisfaction that can say, “It is well with my soul.”
Do you know that you are meant to experience that kind of contentment?
Do you know that you need to go no further, strive no harder, search no deeper to taste the sweet satisfaction that you were made to crave?
The living God has offered to reside in the depths of your soul and spring up a well that never runs dry, always quenches your thirst, and refreshes eternally.
But we are like pregnant women who crave ice cream while our bodies’ true need is calcium, pickles while our true need is sodium, or McMuffins while our true need is… well, I’m not sure about that one, but I craved egg McMuffins. We’ll just say I needed fat and I got it.
Understanding Our Deepest Cravings
Your hunger has been misplaced.
In all of us, there is a deep sense that there is something more. Something worth running after. We were made to crave the source of eternity, the One who holds it all together, the One who made you and me.
The cravings of our flesh are indicators of a deeper thing.
Indicators and not Dictators:
- A craving for food? Perhaps a need for comfort and a full heart.
- A craving for drink? Perhaps a need for peace or a way out or an exuberant adventure.
- A craving for sex? Perhaps a need for intimacy.
- A craving for attention? Perhaps a need for affection stemming from being known.
- A craving for friendship? Perhaps just that – a need for friendship – but one that will fall short if the expectation is that mere humans could fulfill that God-sized expectation.
If we don’t ask questions like, “What is this craving really telling me?” or “What will reallysatisfy my need?” then our desires will be misguided and we will feed ourselves things that will never fill us. Our souls will go hungry.
The Thing Is Not The Thing
What are you hungry for?
- Is it the friend or boyfriend or spouse or family?
- Is it a school or a program or a job?
- Is it reprieve from whatever trial you are facing?
Remember, the thing is not the thing.
You keep chasing that thing, and even when you get it, it won’t satisfy. You will be like a woman running down a never-ending, dead-end road. You will get so tired. So very tired.
I have been in that place – tired, so very tired.
So, What Then?
Are we not supposed to be hungry? Are we supposed to shut down these cravings?
No!! Not at all!!! BE HUNGRY.
But know what satisfies!
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. … God who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”
C.S. Lewis
It is a myth that God needs anything from us, that he needs our worship or attention or love. No, WE NEED to worship and have His attention and His love. When we worship God, it opens us to an influx of His breath and life and love and care. He knows that our souls are at rest – deeply satisfied – when our hearts are found at home in Him when our mouths shape words that praise Him, and our energy is used to love Him and pursue Him and serve the world that He created. When we operate FROM love rather than FOR love, life looks altogether different.
The things we hunger for – even good things – will devour us if we think they will deliver on something they never promised us.
God has promised us love and joy and a future. He has promised us intimacy and satisfaction and delight. Created things of this world can fulfill no such promise.
After Jesus feeds the 5000 with a little Jewish boy’s Lunchable, showing that he indeed cares about our physical needs, he then speaks to our deeper hunger: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (John 6:35)
Jesus says to the woman at the well, who has thirsted for the love of men and has been left wanting, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)
We Hunger to be the Object of Someone’s Desire
As women, like this woman, we hunger so deeply to be the object of someone’s desire.
Do you know that craving was planted in you when God wove you together as Psalm 139 describes?
“God has planted eternity in the human heart.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
HE LOVES YOU. He delights in you. He is speaking. Will you listen?
“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.” Jeremiah 24:7
Will you go to the Word searching for His FACE and not His HANDS. Will you go to prayer seeking His CHARACTER and not what he can OFFER you?
“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it–the fact that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands; I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me and continues to know me.”
–J.I. Packer
This God loves you so much that He sent His son for you. This man loved you so much that he gave up the eternal presence of His Father to live a life you could not live, die a death that you deserved, and be raised from that death to make a way for you to have a relationship with the living God for all of eternity. OH my GOODNESS!? Do you realize?!!
He loves you so deeply, so completely, so utterly, so purely. His thoughts are for you and His plans for you are so beyond fathoming.
Many, O Lord my God, are Your wonderful works
Which You have done;
And Your thoughts toward us
Cannot be recounted to You in order;
If I would declare and speak of them,
They are more than can be numbered.
In prayer, we so often sit in the presence of the living God, with the eyes of our heart turned toward ourselves, the words of our mouths ruminating on the cravings of our flesh, and the thoughts of our hearts on anything other than the magnificence of the God in whose presence we sit.
We have been given a magnifying glass and turned it upside down, making our problems and our limited understanding of our chief focus. And as they loom large, God is made to seem so very small. Our faith atrophies, our addictions, and our hunger gains strength and we say; this faith thing does not work. God is silent. He either doesn’t care, or doesn’t exist.
And we go HUNGRY.
But if we flip that looking glass around and begin to magnify God, searching Scripture for who He is, speaking aloud the names He is given, meditating on His character, praising Him for the things He has done…
… He will grow grander than our most pressing trial, sweeter than our happiest of moments and more powerful than our greatest fear!
My friends, I cannot tell you the satisfaction that comes when you begin to make Him your highest aim, your most treasured thought, your most secret love.
Let Us Be Daughters Who Believe …
When You said, “Seek My face,”
My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord,
I will seek.”–Psalm 27:8, NKJV
Emily Jamieson is first and foremost a trajectory shifter. As a mom to four boys, wife to Marshall, academic and life coach, speaker, and prolific writer, Emily’s hope is for people to know they are created with purpose and for a purpose. She lives to see others equipped and launched in the areas the Lord has called them too. She currently lives in Gig Harbor, Washington with her family.
