Physical Hunger

For the past eight years, the non-profit organization CARE has been tracking what it calls the year’s ten worst humanitarian crises. This year places like Angola, Zambia, Burundi, and Uganda faced famines, wars, or crises that impacted at least one million people. CARE uses a media monitoring service to count the number the crisis gets mentioned in mainstream media sources. Then it compares that number to the number of times more popular stories get mentioned.

Here are some examples from their annual report: There were over 273,000 online articles about the new Barbie film, while the abuse of women’s rights in every country in the report received next to no coverage. The crisis in Angola received the least media attention in 2023. Despite 7.3 million people in the country in desperate need of humanitarian aid, it received just 1,049 media mentions.

By comparison, 273,421 articles were written about the new iPhone 15. Taylor Swift’s world tour garnered 163,368 articles while Prince Harry’s book Spare got 215,084. Meanwhile, drought and floods in Zambia had 1,371 articles.

The CARE report concludes: “In a world where news cycles are becoming more short-lived, it is more important than ever that we collectively remember that every crisis, whether forgotten or not, brings with it a human toll.”

John Piper writes: “My own serious consideration of fasting as a spiritual discipline began as a result of visiting Dr. Joon Gon Kim in Seoul, Korea. ‘Is it true,’ I asked him, ‘that you spent 40 days in fasting prior to the evangelism crusade in 1980?’ ‘Yes,’ he responded, ‘it is true.’”

Dr. Kim was chairman of the crusade expected to bring a million people to Yoido Plaza. But six months before the meeting the police informed him they were revoking their permission for the crusade. Korea at that time was in political turmoil and Seoul was under martial law. The officers decided they could not take the risk of having so many people together in one place. So Dr. Kim and some associates went to a prayer mountain and there spent 40 days before God in prayer and fasting for the crusade. Then they returned and made their way to the police station. “Oh,” said the officer when he saw Dr. Kim, “we have changed our mind and you can have your meeting!”

When Rev. Heber Brown III started noticing a particular need trending in his church, he did what pastors do – he found a way to spearhead a solution. Jesus said that man shall not live by bread alone; now, neither do the people under Brown’s care.

That’s because his church, Pleasant Hope Baptist, planted a community garden in order to provide the people in their community with fresh produce. Since food deserts, obesity, and diabetes plague many parts of Baltimore, the garden is meeting a critical need in the community.

Not content to keep all the goodness, Brown considered what might happen if he could find other local and regional partners. “We saw attendance bump up in our worship, we saw a great energy … and it went so [well] here, that I wondered what would happen if we could spread it through other churches and create a network of churches that do the same thing.”

Spreading it around meant not only partnering with local farmers and starting a pop-up farmers’ market after church, but partnering with other churches in neighboring Baltimore, Washington D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina in an initiative known as the The Black Church Food Security Network.

“If you come in with the mentality that I cannot be fully free until everybody is fully free, it makes for better partners,” said Rev. Brown, in a local radio interview. “And if we are strategic in being courageous subversives for each other, then I think the world that our children will inherit will be better than the one that we’re in right now.”

Potential Preaching Angles:

God cares about all of our needs, and Jesus often paired spiritual renewal with the meeting of physical needs. So if we’re going to be like Jesus, it might mean helping people get enough healthy food to eat.

Conventional wisdom surrounding the function of taste buds focuses on five essential types of flavor sensations: sweet, salty, savory, sour and bitter. To that list, scientists have added a sixth taste—starchy.

Professor Joyun Lim from Oregon State University, explains the justification for the recent addition. Lim's team of researchers found volunteers who could identify starch-like tastes in various carb solutions, even after being administered a solution that blocked the taste of sweetness. Lim said, "Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It's like eating flour."

Of course, starch has yet to be completely enshrined in the proverbial Hall of Taste. Food scientists insist that primary tastes be recognizable, have identifiable taste receptors on the tongue, and trigger a useful physiological response.

Lim and other scientists are working on finding those taste receptors, but for useful physiology, one need look no further than elite athletes. There's a reason why bodybuilders, distance runners, and basketball players all use terms like "carbing up" or "carb loading" to describe their culinary habits. The cliché is true—the body knows what it wants.

Potential preaching angles: To hunger and thirst after righteousness, we must recognize its taste, God's wisdom is evident in creation through cravings that track our bodily needs

Dr. Robertson McQuilkin of Columbia International University tells a story about visiting his son in India. His son was working and living in the slums of Calcutta (a city of fifteen million) not far from the ministry of the Sisters of Charity, the group Mother Teresa began. McQuilkin was a seasoned world traveler, but here the squalor of poverty that he witnessed on the drive from the airport simply overwhelmed him. The smells of humanity and sewer water combined with a million people living on the streets brought him to tears.

His driver noticed this and said to him, "Don't worry, Dr. McQuilkin. In a few days you'll get used to it." McQuilkin responded, "That's exactly what I don't want to happen. I don't want to get used to it."

Macrina Wiederkehr writes in “A Tree Full of Angels”:

Fasting makes me vulnerable and reminds me of my frailty. It reminds me to remember that if I am not fed I will die … Standing before God hungry, I suddenly know who I am. I am one who is poor, called to be rich in a way that the world does not understand. I am one who is empty, called to be filled with the fullness of God. I am one who is hungry, called to taste all the goodness that can be mine in Christ.

In an article for Psychology Today magazine, Hara Marano writes about the constant pressure girls face concerning their image. Deprived of an internal compass, girls compete to be "hottest," turning colleges into incubators for eating disorders and numerous unrealistic, self-imposed expectations.

But why?

Marano cites Courtney Martin, author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. Martin believes the chief problem is that young women think they have to be everything: overachievers in academics, successful in their chosen career, and the life of the party. Adding to the mounting pressure, today's girls are told they can look any way they want. Over time, they "compose the self as perfect, with a perfect résumé and a perfect body."

New York psychotherapist Steven Levenkron has been treating young women with eating disorders for three decades. He contends that peer pressure is by far the number one reason girls work hard to be extremely thin. "Those who aren't mentored by parents are not inoculated against peer pressure. They wind up turning to their peers and to the media, to the outside society, for guidance on how to appeal to men." Hollywood, in turn, ends up giving them unrealistic messages about femininity.

Richard Hersh, former director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education, blames a girl's image obsession on the culture of neglect—kids raising kids. Parents and teachers have allowed children to be nurtured by television, the Internet, and their peers. Parents and teachers have abdicated mentoring and overly shelter them from life experiences to avoid pain and failure. They enter college "socially and emotionally fragile." The all-too-common results are anorexia and bulimia, depression, drinking and drug use, and attempts at suicide. Data shows that about 40 percent of college-age women have experienced an eating disorder.

In the article Marano shares the testimony of 17-year-old Chloe:

Dieting made me feel I was in control of something. It was one thing I knew I could change on my own. I would diet and get positive feedback and feel really good. So I wouldn't eat for a few days at a time. …

You compare yourself to other people. Each of my friends was vying to be better than the other. I was in a restaurant with my boyfriend and a girl walked in who was really pretty and much thinner than me. I saw him glance at her. I went into the bathroom and cried. …

[Boys are] constantly comparing women to each other: 'That girl is really hot; she's so much hotter than her friends.' So we compete to be the hotter friend. Some days it makes you feel fat. On particularly bad days, I can look at children and think that when I'm older, that little 3-year-old girl is going to steal my husband.

The New England Journal of Medicine recently exposed another factor that contributes to obesity: a person's circle of friends. Statistics say it isn't long before a person of stronger discipline and a smaller waistline soon matches a larger friend's desire for food. In fact, the study found that the threat of obesity increases 57 percent if a person's friends are overweight.

U2 singer Bono, in a private meeting in June 2001 on the Hill in Washington, D.C., said this about helping the needy of the world:

What will really wake people up is when Sunday schools start making flags and getting out in the streets. Forget about the judgment of history. For those of you who are religious people, you have to think about the judgment of God.

Who could speak more realistically about the illusion of a yuppie value system than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who suffered deprivation of all that money can buy?

In "The Prison Chronicle" he says, as few of us can, "Don't be afraid of misfortune and do not yearn after happiness. It is, after all, all the same. The bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold, and if hunger and thirst don't claw at your sides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms work, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well."