22/07/2026
HOLY HUNGER
This morning, I found myself reading Psalm 42 aloud, echoing within my four walls the cry that has come down through generations of believers as the language of HOLY HUNGER: “As the deer pants for the waters…” Go ahead, take out your Bible and read it again.
Perhaps it was no coincidence when yesterday evening a deer wandered into the garden and lingered, and it began to stir something ancient and very deep within me. Reminding me of the texts that talk about looking for the ancient ways.
Or perhaps it was the heartache of a question I had brought before the Father—the quiet grief of friendships that have fractured, and my own longing to be heard in each situation, to explain, to be understood in the middle of the mess these things serve up to us.
But God's response came in a way I would not have chosen. He did not speak comfortingly but rather gave me a questioning invitation to do things differently.
“Is it more important to you to speak your side of each story, or to remain in the place of hunger for My presence?” I don’t remember thinking specifically about the connection between hunger and a willingness to die to self in such personal areas, and so, like a child unwilling to surrender both, I whispered back, “Can I not have both, God?”
He answered with such clarity, with the kind of simple truth that forms Christ within us: “No.”
We live in an age, even within the Church, that has learned to mirror the world, telling us we can have everything: vindication and intimacy, expression and surrender, platform and presence. But the way of God is narrower, deeper, and far more costly.
This past year, He has been teaching me the way of Jesus - not in power, nor in proclamation, but in silence.
A silence chosen in obedience.
A silence that refuses to defend itself publically or behind the scenes.
A silence that does not rush in desperation to be understood - because I long for something more than human understanding.
And in that silence, something has been born within me. A fresh hunger so deep, so consuming, that it defies human language. I’ve always called it “Divine Agony”, as I’ve no other way to talk about the sacred desperation that no human affirmation can satisfy, no audience can replace, no platform can imitate.
It is the ache of the soul that has tasted God and cannot live without Him.
And I am beginning to see that this hunger, this agonizing and unbearable longing, is not a burden, but a gift.
For there is nothing this world can offer that compares to a life undone by desire for His presence.
