Spiritual hunger is a precondition to God's blessing. The problem is, we are in denial about our condition—or we are taught to be in denial. When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally take me with her when she visited friends. Sitting on the couch next to her with my hands folded in my lap, listening to conversation that was meaningless to me as a small boy, was an excruciatingly dull ...

It is the desire for God which is the most fundamental appetite of all, and it is an appetite we can never eliminate. We may seek to disown it, but it will not go away. If we deny that it is there, we shall in fact only divert it to some other object or range of objects. And that will mean that we invest some creature or creatures with the full burden of our need for God, a burden which no creature ...

The Tuesday night prayer meeting at Brooklyn Tabernacle felt like skydiving into a tornado, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. I'd read about the meeting in Pastor Jim Cymbala's book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, but nothing prepared me for the event itself: 3,500 God-hungry people storming heaven for two hours.

Afterward, my friend and I went out to dinner with the Cymbalas. In the course of the meal, ...

Heading home to California … a friend and I passed through the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. On the way to the connecting gate, we heard loud patriotic music playing and saw a group, mostly women, wearing colorful hats, cheering, and waving American flags. The troops were coming home, and here was their welcoming committee.

Two women encouraged us to grab flags and join in. We were early for our ...

To help Americans understand poverty in its truest sense, Robert L. Heilbroner, a prominent U.S. economist, itemized the luxuries most U.S. citizens would have to abandon if they were to adopt the lifestyle of their 1.2 billion neighbors who truly live in poverty:

We begin by invading the house of our imaginary American family to strip it of its furniture. Everything goes: beds, chairs, tables, television ...

Crazy things happen to our sense of judgment when we get angry.

In February 2009, a 27-year-old woman from Fort Pierce, Florida, walked into a McDonald's restaurant and ordered a 10-piece McNuggets meal. You know how it is when you're hungry and you have a taste for something particular. Your imagination starts working and you can almost taste those McNuggets now.

Well, that's when things got really ...

For almost 10 years, Adam Bruckner, [assistant coach for the Philadelphia Kixx indoor soccer team], has made it his personal mission to help the homeless. Actually, "help" would be an understatement for what he does. Although he earns a modest income, he gives away practically everything. And when he decided that wasn't enough, he whittled his living expenses down to two items: gas for his car and ...

Chris Heuertz is the international director of Word Made Flesh, an organization that helps the world's poor. In his book Simple Christianity, Heuertz writes that one night in particular stands out in all his world travels. While walking the streets of Kolkata, a destitute region in South Asia, Heuertz and his companions—Josh, Sarah, and Phileena, Heuertz's wife—stumbled across a person ...

My wife and I have found a simple program that lets us reach out to our neighbors and helps feed the hungry at the same time. It's called Neighborhood Connections Thru Canning Hunger. It allows us to gradually build relationships with our neighbors by visiting them every two months to collect goods for people who are hungry.

First, we prayer-walk the streets, asking that God will move our hearts to ...

People call him "Shoe Bob," but his real name is Bob Fisher. He owns a small shoe repair shop tucked in a corner of a little strip mall in Wayzata, Minnesota. Average height, average build. Shoe Bob looks like your average, hard-working, churchgoing guy.

But he is not an average guy.

Shoe Bob is a radical servant who has found a way to help the homeless. He helps the homeless by rallying his whole community, ...