“A satisfied soul tramples the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul any bitter thing is sweet.” Proverbs 27:7 (LSB)

Many years ago when I was a youth leader, our church did an event that was meant to help our students understand a little better what it meant to struggle with hunger, as many people throughout the world regularly experience. To do this, we asked our students to participate in a 40-hour fast, where they wouldn’t eat anything, and would only drink water or juice.

The fast began on a Friday morning, and once they were out of school, they came to the church for us to begin a series of activities that would help round out the experiment. We did a canned food drive that was done in a fun and competitive way, with teams going out into the community with a wheelbarrow asking for canned food items. The team with the most food was declared the winner, and the food was donated to a local food pantry.

Along with a time of Scripture reading, Bible study, and singing, we ended the night with all of our students sleeping outside in cardboard boxes on the church grounds, wearing the clothes they came in after school. This activity was meant to help them better understand what some homeless people experience.

In the morning, as we emerged from our cardboard cocoons in the wet dew of the morning, we continued with our programmed activities…without food. I don’t know about you, but all of my experiences as a teenager, and with all the teenagers I know, food is a pretty important part of their lives. And they eat a lot! But this experience brought to light a reality that most if not all of them had never thought about in their affluent upper middle class world–associating with those who have very little.

When we were ready to break the fast, the worried parents of these teens volunteered to provide a feast of pizza and other foods they knew the teens would love. We kindly thanked them for their generous offers but declined because we knew two things, the fast needed to be broken slowly and carefully (pizza isn’t a great first meal after not eating for almost two days), and the reality is that those who struggle with poverty don’t have the choice of gorging themselves on pizza when they haven’t eaten.

Our final activity for this event was to serve a dinner of a bowl of white rice with a scoop of pinto beans on top. Again, many teenagers are picky eaters, and any mom who tried to serve their kids a bowl of beans and rice would get laughed at. As a matter of fact, I remember that some parents warned me and my wife that their kids would never eat what we had prepared. But had their kid ever not eaten for 40 hours? They had become so hungry at the beginning of the fast that they argued over a student who had been sneaking breath mints–wasn’t that eating? they argued!

And to add one more lesson to the range of emotions they must have felt, we asked one more thing from these kids–when it came time to eat, they couldn’t serve themselves. They needed to restrain their flesh and think of others as more important than themselves. They needed to wait for someone else to serve them. Once everyone had a bowl, and we prayed, they were free to eat.

Proverbs says, “A satisfied soul tramples the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul any bitter thing is sweet.” (LSB). As stunned parents watched, their teenage sons and daughters served one another and sat to enjoy the best-tasting meal of their young lives. How good hot rice and beans were to their body and soul. They had been so satiated with the honeycomb of their wealthy lives that they couldn’t see the everyday blessings all around them. But when they were stripped away for a short time time, Oh how sweet the simple things in life had become. Satisfaction doesn’t come from the things we have, but from our heart attitude, and contentedness with what the Lord has given us.

In this entitled culture, so many people think that they are owed every comfort that this life has to offer. Personal rights are demanded, and the individual is placed on a greater level than the whole of society. This sort of entitlement will never satisfy the one who chases it. We might think that if we get everything we want and long for we will finally be happy. The reality is that happiness isn’t found in having your personal rights and demands fulfilled. A simple review of celebrity news will make that fact abundantly clear. True joy is found elsewhere–in a relationship with the One who has given us all things, including Himself. When we forget this simple fact, we will seek satisfaction everywhere else, and that elusive high will never last because we weren’t created to find happiness in ourselves. True happiness can only be found in Jesus Christ.