Cannibalism

The tragedies of Haiti have overtaken our emotions and caused us as Americans to rally around the ravaged country. We've been overwhelmed by mass graves, orphan children, and people without food. The pictures have moved many to donate resources, pray, and even to personally travel to the reeling country to volunteer help.

The hunger in Haiti is very real. People are walking the streets in search of anything to call food. While relief services are transporting tons of food to help feed the masses, the hunger pit seems bottomless. After eating today, the helpless hunger will return again tomorrow. the challenges ahead are centered in helping the people of Haiti develop new ways of feeding themselves in a country filled with rubble, unsanitary conditions, and disease.

In America, we have compassion for these tragic, helpless people. But the truth is that in many ways we have become hunger victims ourselves. I'm not talking about the food which is readily available at any number of dozens of food markets located within a short driving distance from our homes. Or the countless restaurants that dot the local landscape filled with hungry people that enjoy ordering more food than they can eat.

In America we are hungry to know ourselves. As individuals we chase the illusive "me" throughout our lives in a frantic daily sprint of activity that somehow creates an illusioned self. My job, my title, the things I've accumulated, my pleasures, all have become a food fix for trying to fill an empty stomach that seeks self-discovery and societal acceptance. We have become detached observers of our own lives caught in a squirrel cage, thinking that the constant squeaking of the wheel of our achievements is a verification of our reality and worth.

This chase motivated by hunger has actually eaten away at our true self as we are consumed by doubt and self-hate. We live in this sort of shadow existence in which we find our image self between our true self and God. As helpless observers, we watch ourselves living out a life we know to be a fragmented tragedy. This path of self hunger is not been relegated to non-Christians alone for it too has found its way into the church and consumed believers. The very thing we seek is being consumed by the drive to keep up an image. The result are lives filled with relational rubble and the disease of fearful rejection.

We have literally become cannibals of our true self.

Paul wrote, "Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead fix your attention on God." (Rom 12)

The journey out of daily hunger and self-cannibalism is not going to be the quick fix of an instant meal of what I do, what others think I am, or what I have. Under a culture that consumes us, we will constantly live under the temptation of the world of the false self as an answer to knowing the real me. Cultural values that surround us leads to a constant hunger to know the real me.

The true journey to know me is found in a life of centering in God because our true identity is found only in him. By means of silence and solitude we journey into ourselves.

It is only there our hunger can be satisfied.

That is counter-cultural...that is the Godlife.