Cravings and needs

DAILY BYTE

For Easter when I was small, my parents used to fill baskets with all sorts of small gifts and hide them somewhere in the house for us to find. We, of course, would search the house from top to bottom for as long as it took to find them because we desperately wanted and OH – we even needed - the white chocolate candy and jelly beans that would inevitably be there… Never mind the story of the resurrection…the candy only came once a year. I still get a craving every Easter for white chocolate in the shape of a bunny rabbit. Somehow, strangely, it tastes better, if it’s shaped like that, and you can start feasting on it by morbidly biting the ears off…

But such silliness aside - think now, what is your white chocolate rabbit…? What is it that you want, that you crave, that you envision would taste so sweet and make life so rich and make you so full? What are your deepest needs right now?

Money, time, energy, family, a job, a home, food, that jazzy new piece of technology? Everyone’s got something that they crave.

We read in the passage from Luke for today these very familiar verses – “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

The Christian life seems like a pretty good deal! Ask for what you want, and you’ll get it! Seek out what you need, and you’ll find it! Where else on the planet are you ever told that? In our earthly lives there is always a cost for things – rarely is something simply an unselfishly given gift. But these verses can be quite a source of consternation when we ask, and we don’t receive, when we seek and we don’t find. Sometimes we never receive what we ask for, or we receive it waaay later than we ask for it, or we receive it in a way that surprises us with its creativity... Or, we receive something different – even something more than we ask for.

Well, unlike the Easter baskets of most American children, which are piled high with nothing but sweets, my mother, the minister, would put a few of those sweet treats in but then fill the rest of our baskets with things like short books on modern-day saints like Mother Teresa, prayers for children, family devotionals, and verses of scripture tattooed on various plaques and key chains for us to put on our shelves and carry with us.

The white chocolate craving has stayed with me, but more so than that, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, the beauty of those scriptures of Jesus and resurrection, the stories about people like Mother Teresa, who were filled with the Holy Spirit, and the importance of constant prayer. Those are the things that I truly needed, as a young person, learning who Jesus was and who I was to the world.

Is there a difference between what we want and crave and what we need? How might God be providing for your wants and needs in life? Is there a need for you to re-evaluate what you want?

FOCUS READING

Luke 11:9-10 (NRSV)

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.