the eucharist

I’m hungry for it.

I sat in church Sunday night and sang the Advent songs and read the corporate prayers from centuries past and listened to the pastor preaching on the redemptive hope God brings to the most unlikely people and my heart was filled with a deep ache, a powerful longing, a thirst and a hunger.

They called us up for Communion and they didn’t say what they normally say – that the bread and the wine represent the body and blood of Christ. No, they quoted Jesus and said that it is His body and His blood and I thought, “I wish it was.”

The nature of the Eucharist was (and maybe still is) the strangest of all Catholic doctrines to me when I first encountered it; like the disciples in John 6, it almost made me want to turn away because it is so hard to understand and accept. We’ve had centuries of Christians trying to explain it away when maybe we should be taking it seriously… I thought maybe I would just forget about it and instead study the other points of difference, and wait to see how God would move.

And sitting in a Protestant church, I felt an incredibly deep hunger for the presence of God – to feel Him in me, tangibly, here and now, because here and now is where and when I need Him, in my weakness and in my sin. Broken, I need His wholeness; thirsty, I need His living water; struggling, I need His grace. As I sat there, I hungered for His body, broken for me, for the true Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I’m not even sure if I believe it yet, intellectually, but emotionally my heart was telling me that I need it.

Sigh.

Show me Your way, Lord, and light my path with Your Word, that my feet might not stray from the truth. I know that You are true, and righteous, and holy; draw me near to You.