I was asked to help someone beginning to blog. The topic was chastity, so I came up with this intro. It was rejected, so I thought I would post it here. Feel free to reject it also. The title I gave this: Love at Something Greater that 425 Degrees
If we are hungry, we can be completely consumed by a pizza in front of us. That thin and crispy, cheesy delight can satisfy our hunger until our appetite returns, which in my case is usually about five minutes after finishing the last slice. Hunger, then desire, then consumption, then a new desire: maybe this time an ice cream sundae. Our love and quest for food shows us that there is nothing in the grocery aisle that can perfectly satisfy us. In a certain sense, our hunger creates a game that we can never really win. We seem to have great victories, say at Thanksgiving, but even our gorging gives way to the return of hunger.
I could talk all day about food, but this isn't The Food Network, and there is an organ located above the stomach that makes for better conversation because the hunger it creates within us is the greatest hunger we can experience. Since the hunger that the heart creates is extreme, and we already realize that we can't win the gastronomical battle, we might decide that love is automatically a lost cause. Then we might decide to make love into a game and play it the same way we play the hunger game: we'll just try to have momentary, highly pleasurable experiences that stave off the aching in our heart. But like the consumption of food, the ache returns. The more we try to satisfy the longing of the heart with good feeling experiences, the more we will find that we have left our heart more empty than ever, which may lead us to more and worse foolhardy acts.
Though the heart and the stomach border each other inside of us, and they both create a hunger within us, they are light years apart when we consider the options open to us to satisfy their hungers. At Safeway there is no perfect food we can choose, but there is a real choice that we can make that will fulfill the longing of the heart. We never make the choice perfectly, but the object of our desire and the One to be chosen is perfect. Making this choice is not a game, but it is an adventure.