Did you see the story about the man who was found living in a grocery store?  Store managers had no idea how long he may have been using the business as a residence.  He very likely would have continued to escape discovery if he had not been found passed out from dehydration and malnourishment.  That’s right!  His body was emaciated from an extended period of having no solid food or liquids.  His deteriorated physical condition remains an inexplicable mystery, especially since he was surrounded by a vast array of fresh produce, hundreds of ready-to-eat food products, and an entire aisle of juices and soft drinks.  The man was transported to a local hospital and put on an aggressive regimen of IV fluids.  Doctors are cautiously optimistic that he will make a full recovery.

Isn’t that incredible?  Do you find it hard to fathom how something like this could occur?  Well, there’s a reason for that.  I made the whole thing up; it never happened.  Who knows?  Maybe this story will soon appear on Snopes.com!  I completely fabricated the previous paragraph, not for the purpose of deceiving anyone, but in an effort to make a point.  While I’ve never heard of anything like this happening in a physical way, it regularly happens in epidemic proportions in a spiritual sense.

If you are friends with me on Facebook, you know that I inadvertently baptized my old cell phone in the Gulf of Mexico last week.  Alas, it didn’t survive the experience, so I upgraded to my very first iPhone.  Being a complete smartphone novice, I asked my FB friends to suggest mobile apps that they found to be especially useful and helpful.  Among the many wonderful recommendations that I received were those for numerous Bible apps.

This reminded me just how ubiquitously available the Word of God is to those of us who are blessed to live in the Western world.  Go to any Christian bookstore and you will find a massive wall of Bibles in every conceivable format and the full gamut of contemporary English translations.  The digital age has far surpassed Gutenberg’s dream by making the Spirit’s sword electronically accessible with the click of a mouse on our laptops or the touch of a finger on our tablets and phones.  We are literally (and cyberly) surrounded by a veritable and virtual mega-mart of food for our souls.

In such a marvelous age as this, what a tragedy if we suffer from “a famine throughout the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord,” (Amos 8:11).

Fabricated story or not, don’t be that guy!