Episode 5: The Tiger in a Box

Erin Davis: Hey Bethany, you are a new mom—relatively new; your son is a toddler. I want to know, are you surprised how much of your role as a mom revolves around food?

Bethany Beale: You know, it has been quite a surprise. I look at Davy and I’m like, “How are you so thin? You eat all of the time!” He’s starting to talk now, so it’s like, “’Nack! ’Nack!” is what he says for food. “’Nack!” I’m going to have to get your advice though, because you have several boys, so I don’t even know . . . How do you keep the fridge full with that many boys in the house?

Erin: Well, it’s a full-time job. It’s a line item on our budget. We eat six boxes of cereal, two gallons of regular, and four pints of almond milk in a week. That’s what my boys eat.

Bethany: Oh, my goodness!

Erin: It’s wild. My advice is, just go for the cereal. I mean, I held out for years on strictly nutritious snacks. Cheerios with no honey—not the Honey Nut, the straight Cheerios—and then I was like, I just have to keep these boys fed.

What’s Davy’s favorite snack?

Bethany: That’s really good. We try to keep candy out of the house because he’s so little, so if he gets it, then I’ll eat it all.

Erin: Right.

Bethany: He actually loves apples. He loves to get a whole apple and take three bites, and then he’s done with it. So right now we have five apples on the counter with two bites each. So, I need to figure that one out, because that’s not a great plan.

Erin: Here is a mom tip. When you take road trips, which I know you guys like road trips, the Davis family likes road trips. I always put an older boy in charge of snack bags. Every kid gets his own snack bag with a couple bottles of water and whatever. Then we’re not fighting over the bag of chips the whole time. But that’s the reason my kids love road trips—the snack bags. That’s the purpose to them.

Bethany: I mean, isn’t that why I love them, too? Snack bags?

Erin: Yes, it is. You’re right.

Bethany: Welcome back to The Deep Well with Erin Davis. Erin just released a forty-day devotional called Fasting and Feasting. She’s taking us on a biblical tour of this fascinating and personal topic.

Here’s Erin.

Erin: Let’s get back to feasting. I grew up seeing this print on lots of people’s walls. I don’t think it actually was in my own house, but I saw it lots of places. It was a man with a white beard sitting at the table; he had really deep wrinkles in his face. I think there was even a version of it where there was a woman, but the one I’m thinking about is a man. He’s sitting at the table; there’s a little bit of food there, but it’s all simple. There’s a big book, which I always thought was the Bible, and his hands are clasped in prayer.

Well, you may or may not be familiar with that print, and you may or may not know that the official name of it is Grace. It’s based on a photograph that was taken in 1918, and the story behind the print is pretty fascinating to me.

The original photo was taken by a man named Erik Endstrom. What happened was a foot scraper salesman—which, I don’t even know what that is, but a foot scraper salesman (the old man in the photo) stopped by Endstrom’s little studio in Minnesota. As the world endured the endless sorrows of World War I, which was an absolutely horrific war, Endstrom began to circulate that photo of the shoe scraper salesman sitting at a table in his studio. He said that it was his way of reminding people that thankfulness is what lights our path to hope.

Here’s a direct quote from that original photographer. He said, “I wanted to take a picture that would show people that even though they had do without many things because of the war, they still had so much to be thankful for.”

Now, World War I was a hundred years ago, but doesn’t that thought transcend time? Don’t we still have to do without so many things because of the war? What war? Pick one. Political skirmishes, power struggles are constant; the battle between good and evil, light and darkness, rages on just like it did when this photograph was originally taken. But as God’s people, we still have so much to be thankful for.

In this episode I want us to go back to Matthew chapter 6, where we just were in the previous episode. Jesus is still preaching that greatest sermon of all time in these verses. This is just a few statements away from His notes on fasting. As you think of Scripture, sometimes those chapters and verses can cause us to divide things up and think these are scattered thoughts, but no, this is all one sermon, it’s all one thought, it’s all one lesson. It was in that context that Jesus taught us to pray.

Let me read us Matthew 6:9–13.

Pray then like this: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Obviously, all of that is important, and we could do endless podcast series on this prayer. But I want you in this moment to zero in on the part of Jesus’ prayer that’s about food. Did you hear it? It’s verse 11. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

I’m going to read it again, but first I want you and I to consider a question together. Why are we hungry so often? You’re not going to get through this podcast series without your body nudging you to eat. You might not even get through this episode without your body nudging you to eat. Why did God make us this way?

Here’s a little segment sponsored by National Geographic—I’m just kidding, but here are some interesting animal facts. Sharks can live without food for ten weeks, which is why you don’t want to encounter a hungry shark, because he’s really hungry! Even weirder than that, cave-dwelling olms, which is one of my son Eli’s favorite creatures (they’re white or pink eyeless lizards and they live in the dark of caves)—get this—they can survive a decade without any food at all. Which is good, because there’s not much food down there where they live.

But not us. Our bellies rumble every few hours. Why did God create us this way? Why do we have this built-in need meter, and why does the alarm go off so often?

Okay, be thinking about all those big questions, and listen to Matthew 6:11 again. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

I once heard our relationship with food described as a tiger in a box. Three times a day (or more) we take the tiger out and we feed him. We attempt to contain our cravings, day after day, year after year, for our whole lives, and as we do, sometimes the tiger bites back. You wake up every morning and the tiger growls for breakfast. Then it’s lunch time and the tiger is baring his teeth again. You can hear his low growl in the evening just before dinner, especially if dinner is taking longer than you had intended it to. You see the tiger. That’s when we use the phrase we call “hangry.” It’s the tiger inside of us growling for food. If you don’t feed the tiger, he’s going to get louder and louder.

I love that picture for what we all face, which is that we have a daily reminder for our physical need—and it’s universal. All people everywhere on the planet, we all have this inescapable reality that if we stop eating, we will stop living. In fact, when patients are on hospice, that’s one of the first things they’ll point to, to indicate that death is near: the patient stopped eating. Every man, every woman, every child, every grandma, every kindergartener, we’re all united by our constant need for food.

Here is an interesting question. What if this daily struggle with food isn’t a daily struggle at all? What if it’s actually a lavish grace that God gives all of us, each of us, every single one of us? Because daily hunger is one of the many ways that God alerts us to our desperate need for Him.

There’s a prayer that I pray pretty often. When something goes wrong and I’m suddenly aware that I can’t handle something on my own, I will pray, “God, I need You. I just know it now.” It’s my way of acknowledging that I need Him all the time. There’s that song, “I Need Thee Every Hour.” I frequently say I need Him every nanosecond. There’s never a time when I don’t need Him, but there are times when I’m not aware of it, where I’m not cognizant of my need. So when something makes us aware of our need for God, we can say, “God, I need You, and I know it now.”

The reality of being broken people with broken natures who don’t naturally gravitate towards God and the things He’s called us to is that if we didn’t have these need alarms inside of us, we’d all convince ourselves that we can handle our lives on our own, and that we are the one who meets our own needs.

When we are convinced that “I’m the one who meets my needs,” then it’s a really short leap to, “I’m going to take what I want. I’m going to take what I need, because I’m responsible for myself, and I’m responsible for everybody else. We’re just going to take what we need, because if we don’t take care of ourselves, nobody’s going to do it for us.”

That’s not the attitude God calls us to, and that causes us to operate in a constant state of pride-fueled scarcity. That’s not how I want to be; it’s not how I want you to be.

Theologian Charles Spurgeon once said this: “Anything is a blessing which makes us pray.” In other words, any hunger pang, any heart pang that makes you aware of your desperate need for Jesus is a gift.

Without hunger, physical hunger and spiritual hunger, we’d all convince ourselves we don’t need anyone or anything. If we get quiet enough to listen, we’ll hear our flesh constantly screaming, “I’m in charge of my destiny!” We’ll hear our bodies constantly screaming, “But first, I need a snack!”

Self-sufficiency is the real tiger. The tiger of self-sufficiency is always purring the lie that we can take care of ourselves—except we can’t.

• We need food to survive.
• We need water.
• We need air.
• We need love.
• We need compassion.
• We need purpose.
• We need redemption.
• We need hope.
• We need peace.

None of us have that within ourselves, and we sure don’t have it to give away to others. In other words, we need Jesus.

Because we cannot meet these needs on our own, they’re not just pains. They’re not just something that we should try to distance ourselves from, and quickly. They’re reminders of how desperately we need a Savior, and just how much He wants to and just how much He is able to meet those needs.

I have a friend who loves Jesus very much and hears from Him in really unique ways that I just love. She called me not long ago, and she said, “Erin, I have a word from the Lord for you. Do you have time?” Listen, when this friend calls, I have time!

I sat down, and she said, “Here it is, three words: He is able.” That’s straight from Scripture. I have to be aware of my need in order to be encouraged by the fact that God is able to meet that need. Man, was I encouraged that day! He is able! He’s able to care for me; He’s able to handle what I cannot. He’s able to get me safely to glory with Him. He’s able to care for those I love. He is able. 

Those three words don’t mean a hill of beans if I don’t know that I need Him. That’s two good sentences: I need Him, and He is able.

I’ve sometimes wondered if, somehow, the availability of food that we have here in the modern era and the decline in spiritual desperation and hearts turned to Jesus are connected. Is there a chain that links the fact that we can eat pretty much anything we want, pretty much any time we want, with the fact that there is a steep decline in biblical literacy, a steep decline in people turning their hearts to Jesus—at least here in America? I wonder if we’ve become too far removed from the idea that our hunger is an alarm that we need God. That’s just a thought for you to chew on.

Let me go back to that print that I was describing at the beginning of this episode. If you can picture it in your mind, do so; if you can just Google it, that’s fine. Grace print is what it is. I don’t know; it speaks to me. I think it speaks to a lot of us. I think that’s why it’s one of the most popular prints of all time.

The question is, why? I think maybe the Grace photograph, the Grace print, arrests our hearts because it captures an old man at the very moment God responded to his need alarm. It was the moment that he put the tiger back in the box with a simple “thank You.” 

Every grace-filled reminder of our insufficiency points our hearts back to our sufficient Savior. This is another way that I think, when I look at food and the Bible, I think God’s teaching me about something so much bigger than what I eat. Every hunger pain is a reminder that He’s near. He is not surprised by our need. He’s the one who installed that alarm to alert you to your need. Why? So He could meet it.

When hunger strikes today, and it will, you and I have two options—only two. We can thank the Lord for the reminder that we need Him, or we can try to meet the need in our own strength. I guess that’s what I’m learning most about food as I open my Bible, that food is more than its sum total of calories. Food is a constant object lesson given to us by a good God. 

I’m rethinking some things that I’ve long taken for granted—like, why do we pray before our meals? In my house we say every night, “God is great, God is good; let us thank Him for our food and our family. Amen.” The reason we pray that prayer is because that’s what I prayed growing up. (We added the “and our family” part.) Every night when I was growing up we would say, “God is great, God is good; let us thank Him for our food. Amen.”

I’ve been praying that prayer most days for over forty years. Why? I never asked that question before I studied these verses. But the why is because He has provided for more than forty years, and He always will.

Here’s my practical encouragement for today. Choose to be like the old shoe scraper salesman in the photograph. When you’re hungry today—and you will be—fold your hands, close your eyes, and give thanks to the God who has reminded you over and over and over of your desperate need, so that you would turn to Him. Now, that’s what I call grace.

Bethany: Erin has given us so many helpful things to think about. The next time we get hungry, which may be soon, it’s an opportunity to remember our need for the Lord.

Erin will help you appreciate food as a gift from God, and she’ll also help you grow in gratitude and dependence on Him, through her new forty-day devotional, Fasting and Feasting. You can actually get your own copy right now, today, if you visit ReviveOurHearts.com/TheDeepWell.

Erin Unscripted

It’s time for my favorite part, Erin Unscripted. I have to say, you kind of lost me, Erin, when you mentioned that little creature that you said doesn’t eat for a decade. Were you being serious when you said that?

Erin: Yes, I’m just sending you on all kinds of Google treasure hunts! He’s called an olm, and he’s creepy. I don’t like him, but my boys think he’s awesome. No, he doesn’t eat for a decade. Then when he does eat, it’s just whatever bugs fall to the bottom of the cave floor.

Bethany: That must be his feasting then. He has some serious fasting and feasting going on.

Erin: That’s right!

Bethany: How can we go from just eating—you know, you just get up, you eat, you do the next thing, moving on—to actually rejoicing that we get to eat and enjoy the food? That’s a totally different way to go about it.

Erin: Well, how can we do that with anything? You could turn over and look at your husband in the morning and be like, “Oh, he’s still here,” or you could turn over and look at your husband in the morning and go, “He is still here!” You can think, “Oh, I have to take care of these kids today. I have to pack lunches,” or you can be like, “These are mine, and I get to care for them.”

I don’t think any of us can do it, so I’m glad you asked that. I’m never going to say, “Try harder, podcast listeners; do better,” because I’m just the driver of the “hot mess express.” So you’re never going to hear that from me. But God can do it.

Maybe start with, “God, I do not have a grateful heart. I’m listening to this, and I’m thinking about that man in the painting who bowed in humility, grateful for a little bit of food, and I’m not like that.” So maybe repentance. It sounds like to me, as I’m saying this, repentance sounds like the right next step.

Bethany: Yes, which is something I don’t think of. Oh, I need to repent of the way I take food for granted and don’t even appreciate that I can rejoice for it. Those are things I can say I honestly haven’t thought of. You are making me think, Erin.

Erin: Well, I think for me—see if this applies to you—for me, my greatest systemic area of sin is ingratitude. I think everything else flows out of that. I can get caught up on, “I was awful to my family today,” or “I gossiped about that coworker and I know better.” Well, trace that back, Erin Davis. That goes back to ingratitude. So I think, really, that is a deep root. If your approach to food is not gratitude, start with repentance.

Bethany: What about those of us who feel like, “Okay, we’ve got it. I provide for myself. I have my food. I can eat out whenever I want; life is great. This isn’t an issue for me.” How can we reframe our mindset to remember, “Oh, no, God is actually the provider. It’s actually not you.”

Erin: I think fasting is how you interrupt that cycle, because it doesn’t take you very long at all to go, “Wait a minute. I know that I could drive through Burger King right now and get a Whopper, but there’s something holding me back.” I think empathy is also a really helpful tool. That’s not true of everybody. Not everybody can eat out every time they want to. Not every kid, even here in America, has a full belly, and certainly around the world. So lift your eyes a little bit and realize, if you have food abundance, then you can praise God, and that probably won’t be true your whole life. There will probably be something that interrupts that. But it really is a gift from God, not something because you earned your paycheck and you’ve done it yourself.

Bethany: Yes. That’s exactly the opposite side of the coin, like you just mentioned. I grew up in a family with eight kids, and there were times where . . . My parents started from literally nothing. They just picked up, got married, had a bunch of kids, and started their own business. There were times where it was tight, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur. I remember sometimes being with my mom shopping and the credit card wouldn’t go through, it just wouldn’t go through.

For that person who’s saying, “Okay, you’re saying our needs need to feel like gifts because they remind us of God.” When you’re standing at the checkout line or you’re feeling like, “Okay, we’ve eaten the same thing for dinner five days in a row,” how can that truly be a gift to us? That doesn’t seem to make sense.

Erin: I have super wrestled with that exact same thought as I’ve been writing this and thinking about this, because the truth is, people do starve to death. It would make my life so much simpler if I just said, “People who don’t follow Jesus starve to death, and people who do never have to face hunger.” That’s just not how it is.

I’ll just say, I don’t know the answer for how it could be that you can love God and genuinely go hungry, except I’m going to go back to the point of: that is to point you to Jesus. It’s not that, “I need to learn the lesson and then I’m going to have a full bank account.” That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s beauty in that too, there’s need in that, and there’s opportunity to turn to the Lord.

I’ve faced some of those. My parents got divorced. My mom found herself a single mom of three kids on a teacher’s salary, and there were nights that baked potatoes was the meal. I look back on that with tremendous fondness, even more than the nights where we could have as much pizza as we wanted. I look back on that and go, all we had were baked potatoes, but Jesus was with us, and we had each other. 

You know, with everything, what we see in the snapshot is not the whole picture. God is working. He does love you; He will care for you. I would just keep going back to those truths, even when it doesn’t seem to be true.

Bethany: I feel like there are women who are listening who are relating to what you just shared. Okay, it was baked potatoes. What if they’re the mom, they’re the one, and it’s like, “That’s my kids”? Maybe they are in a marriage that fell apart, or a husband passed away—whatever their circumstances—where they feel like, “I’m the main one providing, and I feel bad. I feel guilty that I can’t do more.” How can they point the people they’re taking care of to Christ and show that gratitude even though they feel bad about it?

Erin: I have two trains of thought there. They’re both pulling out of the station at once; we’ll see what happens.

I look back at that moment in particular as the moment when my mom was the most heroic. I mean, her husband had left her. She didn’t want it. She was left to care for three kids. The money didn’t last from month to month. She creatively thought, “We could have baked potatoes, and we’ll just load them with shredded cheddar cheese and everybody will be happy.” I didn’t in that moment, and I don’t looking back on it, go, “I wish we’d had steak to go with those baked potatoes” (though you girls know I love steak). I just think she made great potatoes, and she gave God glory with the little bit she had.

It reminds me of the widow’s mite. The Lord was like, “She brought what she had, and that was worth more to Me than someone who brought bullions of gold.”

The other train of thought I have is just as a parent. I feel like my kids have abundance. They do. We are upper middle-class Americans. They have everything. I feel like having everything is its own kind of handicap, because they don’t know need.

If I would give them whatever they wanted for breakfast, they would all have cotton candy and chocolate syrup. They would never choose in themselves to eat right, healthy breakfasts, and because they have access to all kinds of things that’s just kind of what they think they’re entitled to. So, I’m having to parent that out of them, which to me is harder than my mom giving us the little bit that she had. I want my kids to be desperately aware of their need for Jesus. Sometimes I see them on their forty-seventh snack of the day, and I think, This is part of the reason they don’t know how much they need the Lord, because they have everything.

You know, it’s not more righteous to be poor or more righteous to have less food in your fridge than I have, but I think the Lord uses all of it, and one way is not the only way that He can work.

Bethany: I love how you keep emphasizing our need for Jesus and going to Him and realizing that He is sufficient. 

One of my all-time favorite verses is from Psalm 42:1, where it talks about how the deer pants for streams of water, “so my soul pants for you, O God.” As you’re talking I’m thinking about that. We know when we’re so thirsty how water just satisfies, and it is so refreshing. There’s all this food and water, and we see this in Scripture. You’re bringing this to the forefront of our minds, but realistically, it doesn’t seem like God is sufficient sometimes. How do we believe that He truly is when we can’t have that—when we drink that water we know, “I feel satisfied now.” But sometimes I go to God, and I don’t feel satisfied. How does that work?

Erin: I think even there He’s trying to show us something. He talks to us about water all the time in Scripture. He’s saying, “I’m the living water. I satisfy the soul with good things. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” All of those things are teaching us greater principles, but I just keep coming back to the fact that we’re broken. Our bodies are broken at a cellular level. Our hearts are broken, our minds are broken, our souls are broken, and the planet is broken. So we’re not going to have that full satisfaction that we think we deserve or we think we want to have. That comes in glory. And as we’re going to talk about (spoiler alert) at the end of this season. I think we’re going to be feasting and drinking in heaven. But this is just a shadow. We’re in the shadowland now, and so you’re right, it isn’t going to be the full satisfaction, but that’s coming. It’s like the snack, I guess.

Bethany: That’s a really good way to think about it.

I loved how we were camping out in the Lord’s Prayer. I just want to know from your life, really practically, you talked about depending on Christ for our daily needs. That prayer kind of unpacks that going to Christ every day. But for you, realistically, how does that look for you? How do you depend on Christ every day for your daily needs? I know you don’t do it perfectly, but how do you even begin to do that?

Erin: I think the longer I follow Jesus the more depth I see in the gospel. The more I see that I don’t showcase the gospel by being perfect, because I never will be. I showcase the gospel by being so aware of my need and even broadcasting it, to some degree. Sometimes we can just be like, “Everything’s a struggle; I’m the worst!” I’m not talking about being Eeyores.

But I know I woke up, I opened my eyes, and I breathed because Jesus gave me that gift. I’m going to get out of my bed and attend to the family that God gave me, and I’m not going to make it very far into that day without sinning, without Jesus. Then I am going to sin even though I have Jesus. The only way to put my feet right back on the track that He has for me is to repent, cry out to Him, and ask Him to empower me by His Holy Spirit to do better. I mean, to me, that’s the walking out your faith with fear and trembling that Scripture talks about—walking step by step. “I do trust You. I do have faith in You, but have You seen what a mess of things I’ve made down here?”

I say to my sons all the time . . . One of the areas that I sin often is just in irritability towards those boys. I’ll say to them, “This is why Mommy needs Jesus so much, because I make this mistake over and over. I see it on your little faces, and I know better, and I can’t seem to do better.” This is why I need Jesus so much.

When two of them will get in a fight (which happens pretty often; it’s pretty scrappy around my house), I’ll pull them together and I’ll say, “This is why we need Jesus so much!” Apart from Him, we will just do this to each other all day long.

I just think it’s at every intersection of need—the highs, the lows, the food, the fights, all of it. “This is why I need You so much, Jesus.” There are plenty of examples every day.

Bethany: Yes, and this little prayer that you shared that your boys pray—I used to babysit kids, and they would pray that exact same prayer. I think it’s so beautiful, even having these short things, whether it’s a Scripture verse we memorize or a short prayer like this, that we can wake up and just thank God. “Thank You! You are good; You are great.” It’s getting our eyes off of ourselves. It’s great. We can steal this little prayer from you: “God is great, God is good; let us thank Him for our food and family.” We can all just wake up the next morning and say that.

Erin: Yes, and add endless “ands”—and my job, and my clothes, and my house, and my country, and my world . . .” Endlessly, everything you have is from Him.

Bethany, get your biggest Bible out, because I’m going to start the next episode with a Bible quiz, and it’s not an easy one.

Bethany: Oh no! I feel like I’m on the spot!

Erin: We’ve released all of the episodes in this series; you can hear it right now.

The Deep Well with Erin Davis is a production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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