I’ve been fasting the last few days — I know if I tell you, I’m in danger of losing my reward, but it helps with the story — and every manner of food looks and smells amazingly good. So at the moment I can’t help but think about food.

Like I remember a meal with my grandma in California. I was 8 or 9 and the first one up after her, so she wanted to fix me breakfast. We sat in her kitchen, just the two of us. She asked what I wanted and I said eggs. She asked me what kind I liked and I said I like them all. She made me six eggs each one prepared differently, all good.

I remember camping with my family at Bald Eagle, actually we stayed in a Yurt. It was Father’s Day we grilled t-bone steaks over an open fire and potatoes wrapped in tin foil. Then we sat around the fire and ate and talked and looked at the stars.

Everyone in my family will tell you about a meal we had at Emerils restaurant once. Our host knew the chef and they just kept bringing out food…it was amazing.

I also remember sitting down to eat at the orphanage in Myanmar. I couldn’t tell you all that we ate, most of it was stuff I wouldn’t order in a restaurant… but I was overwhelmed by the food given so graciously by people who had so little.

And now I’m thinking about Lynn’s cinnamon rolls, chocolate covered rice-krispee bars and turkey chilli. Garlic smashed potatoes and Clem’s bbq. Bacon from the waffleshop & fresh squeezed orange juice from Florida. Sees Candy from from California and chocolate chip banana bread from Maui. And of course, seafood chowder from Kelly’s.

I could go on and on, which is why I think it’s hard for me to fathom the idea of a famine. Most of those reading this blog have never experienced a food-famine. Few of us here have ever had to wonder where our next meal would come from…or if it would come.

A recent Christianity Today article estimated that 25,000 people die every day from hunger-related illnesses and 850 million people are chronically hungry. In 2008 food riots and protests in Bangladesh, Cameron, Egypt, Haiti and Myanmar made the global headlines. Death by famine is a slow, painful death — you’ve turned your face from the tv pictures — that includes physical weakness, susceptibility to disease, mental confusion and the inability to focus or reason, lethargy and death. We can’t watch long, because it is so hard to watch someone starve.

In Amos 8:11-13, these words are recorded,

“The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine on the land not a famine of bread or water but of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from border to border searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. Beautiful girls and strong young men will grow faint in that day, thirsting for the Lord’s word.”

I wonder if it’s already here?  Do we hang on his words, like a starving man would hold on to food?  Hang on his words…while you still can.