“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
The words of Jesus, Matthew 5

The Beatitudes have always challenged me. I love Jesus’ topsy-turvy sayings — blessed are those of you who are in mourning, for in your mourning, you shall be comforted — that illustrate the nature of His Kingdom. But I’d always breezed over this verse until I read it again recently. I love the NLT of this verse: “God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.” I started thinking about whether or not I truly hunger and thirst for righteousness. I find myself hungering for many things (security, stability, significance) but righteousness doesn’t always rate quite as high as it should. Perhaps I could use an appetite-transplant.

And yet, I believe that each of us have an inner hunger, a yearning, for something that transcends our finite existence here on this little ball of earth. C.S. Lewis expressed this quite eloquently: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience int his world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Maybe this is what the writer of Ecclesiastes had in mind several thousand years ago, when he wrote:

God has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

May we learn from our hunger and acknowledge the deepest desires of our heart, the desire for mercy and beauty and righteousness that can only be fulfilled by our Creator God.