I won’t torture you with another rendition of Old Mother Hubbard, but instead I want to visit left field again.

Have you ever heard, or said, that a church/pastor/teacher wasn’t feeding [the person who made the aforementioned comment]? At first glance, that seems logical, and very possible. But since I can’t bring myself to stop right there, follow me along as I take a deeper dive into that comment. Or not, I won’t force you to keep reading.

After the first glance, you need to look at what is being said. It is possible that God is calling you to go somewhere else. Though I have attended the same church all my life, that doesn’t mean I always will, or that everyone will. But, and this is my opinion, not based on any facts that you can look up, I think that too many people are not being called somewhere else when they aren’t “being fed”. What I think is that they are not wanting to eat what is put before them.

As a hefty boy (you can call it fat, I don’t mind), I know what eating is. I am well acquainted with the subject. That being the fact, when I say that I can’t find something to eat, it usually means that there isn’t anything that tickles my fancy. Either I want something specific, or what is there will take too long to fix. I really don’t know what starving means; I have never experienced it. I can say that I am starving, but I just want to eat badly. There are people in the world that eat in a week what I eat in a meal; they know starving.

In the same way, I can’t say I am starving at church when I have all kinds of acces to God’s word. I said in another post that I am rarely more than 20 feet away from a Bible at any given time. There are people who would be jailed, beaten, or killed if they had one page of the Bible. There are others that have never heard the gospel. These are the ones that are starving.

[As I type this, I’m starting to more fully understand the importance of missions.]

I cannot expect to get all of my nourishment from church. I have to snack on it throughout the week. Let me put it another way, albeit a weird one. I entered an eating contest once. Though I didn’t even come close to finishing, I did get something that applies to feeding my spirit. I went the day of the contest without eating much. I had probably 1/5 the normal amount of calories I usually ate. That would seem like a good way to leave room, but here’s what really happened. When it came time to eat, my stomach had went into “survival mode,” it was not ready to handle any food. With that in mind, I couln’t say that I wasn’t fed that day, but that I didn’t eat.

In order to be able to digest the meals I get at church, I have to have my spiritual stomach ready. I need to eat some each day. (A little tip, the Bible has no calories or fat. Eat as much and as often as you can.)

Let’s go beyond the personal side. If that teacher/pastor/church is in God’s will, what are you saying there? They are giving you the message that God gave them, and you’re saying it’s wrong. Does God make mistakes? I might be reading too far into this, but I think there are some valid points. Before you blame someone else, make sure you are not at fault.

If you find yourself not “being fed,” I ask that you be careful with thinking that. Maybe you do need to look elsewhere. Or maybe you need to quit fussing that you didn’t get ice cream and eat your vegetables.