I didn’t learn the word satiation until after I turned forty, when I moved to Germany. Which is strange, because it is an English word. Yet I’ve learned many new words from my own mother tongue by having to translate them from another language.

Here in my new home of Berlin, people often ask after a meal if I am “sat.” Satiated. Satisfied.

My family is from the Southern United States. The question after a meal that I grew up with is: “Are you full?”

After studying nutrition and body recomposition for a while, it’s no wonder that I come from a family of very big people.

The honest answer to “Are you full?” is often:
“I could eat more.”

Full is an extreme condition. To not be able to eat another bite is rare, and often a polite exaggeration. Most good mothers know that. Of course you could eat another bite.

“After all, I made it for you.”

“Jesus save me. It hurts so much… but to spare your feelings I’ll take another slice of pie.”

Hmm… yummy.

But satiation is different.

The experience of satiation requires honoring the experience of hunger.

Hunger can be a ravenous beast at times. It deserves respect. Undirected, it is like a fox in the henhouse, tearing the heads off chickens. But well directed, it guides the body toward its intended target almost unconsciously—like a heat-seeking missile, unyielding until it finds what it seeks.

It helps to know what one is hungry for.

It helps to understand the nature of one’s hunger.

It helps to become familiar with hunger so that we can feed it what it actually needs—because hunger will keep seeking and devouring until it is satisfied, or until it destroys us.

Many of us carry what has been called a God-sized hole in our lives. We try to fill it with all kinds of material solutions. When we are hungry for spiritual sustenance, material sustenance will not suffice.

But that does not mean we will not try.

I spent years stuffing whatever I could find into that God–sized hole called a soul—until I discovered that only God will do.

“You are what you eat,” I told my brother, the Rockin’ Roll Preacher, after communion one Sunday.

So the question remains:

What are you hungry for today?

What does your spirit need?