"The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it." So observed Sixty Minutes commentator Andy Rooney (quoted by Fred Lyon in "The Savior Life Diet," Lectionary Homiletics, August, 1997, p. 21). I made a trip to the discount bookstore this past week to see if Andy Rooney was right. I discovered he was at least partly right. There were lots and lots of cookbooks there. I stopped counting at 250 different titles -- because at 250 I was only half-way through the cookbook section! And, that didn't count the bargain bins!

There was an astonishing array of topics and titles. I found cookbooks for Christmas. And, it's only August! I found Visible Vegetables, The Terrific Pacific Cookbook, Glorious Garlic, 50 Ways with Fish, 365 More Receipts for Chicken, Cooking for Dummies, Dad's Own Cookbook: Everything Your Mother Never Taught You, to name only a few. (It was interesting to me that Cooking for Dummies and Dad's Own Cookbook were really near each other on the bookshelves!)

The bookstore didn't have quite as many diet books. But, there was a fair number of titles, including The Weigh Down Diet, Controlling Your Fat Tooth, The Suzanne Sommers Eat Great Lose Weight diet book, and The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People. (Not being among the "naturally slim" myself, I thought I'd have a look in this one to see what I might learn. I discovered habit number eight was: only eat when you're hungry. Why didn't I think of that?)

And, whether or not the bookstore had them in stoc_esermonsk, we all know there are lots and lots of other diet books and diet plans. It reminds me of the refrigerator magnet I once saw. It read, "A waist is a terrible thing to mind!"

And we're not just obsessed with cookbooks and diet books. Consider the proliferation of restaurants around us. I'm old enough to remember when the first pizza restaurant (it wasn't a pizza parlor, mind you. It was Adamos Pizza Ristorante) and the first Chinese restaurant came to Southern New Hampshire. That's where I grew up. In the 1950s, in Southern New Hampshire at least, Chinese food and pizza were considered "exotic." But, maybe that was just Southern New Hampshire.

But let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages today! Consider the choices we have now: Italian, French, Chinese, Mexican, Irish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian. And, if all the above choices weren't enough, we also have the International House of Pancakes, vegetarian restaurants, and nouvelle cuisine. Cookbooks, diet books, proliferation of restaurants, we Americans seem to be consumed by what we consume.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a healthy concern for our bodies. It's admirable, really. The "body is a temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 6:19, RSV). But I wonder if this obsession with getting food into us, and then getting those unwanted pounds off of us, isn't perhaps symptomatic of something else. Isn't there also often a compulsive quality to the way we consume things other than food?

We have been told through television and radio commercials and print ads that things will make us happy. Therefore, we assume, more things will make us more happy. But they have to be the right things, don't they? Many of us want not only the right food, but also the right clothes, the right schools for ourselves and for our children and their children, the right car, the right house in the right neighborhood, the right career, the right social status, the right vacation location, the right title, even the right church.

Someone has said that our model for living today is more like Madonna, the "material girl," than it is like Mother Teresa. Have we somehow confused our wants with our needs? So, we may be hungry not hungry for food, but hungry in another way. In one of her books, Mother Teresa writes:

The spiritual poverty of the Western world is much greater than the physical poverty of [Third World] people. You in the West have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unwanted and unloved ... These people are not hungry in a physical sense but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is. What they are missing really is a living relationship with God. (Life in the Spirit, Harper and Row Publishers, pp. 13-14)

Another writer, Gary Wallis, puts it like this:

[There is] something we cannot quite put into words ... some inarticulate moan that issues from deep within us ... some sense that our hearts will never be at rest until they rest in God. (Biblical Preaching Journal, Summer, 1994, pp. 20-21, quoted in Lectionary Homiletics, August, 1997, p. 20)

We may pursue the material when what we really need is spiritual. The hunger that drives us to cookbooks and restaurants (and then, to diet clubs or health clubs), the emptiness we try to pack with possessions, the way we may try to fill ourselves up with more recognition, more titles, more awards, more experiences; could these not be our spiritual emptiness crying out for God? Could they not be spiritual hunger pains? Contrast this spiritual hunger with the spiritual fulfillment Angie Garber found.

Angie Garber, nearing the age of eighty, is a woman with many stories. The daughter of an Iowa farmer, she stayed at home to take care of her mentally unstable mother until late in her life. Instead of going to college, she got polio. She has never been married. At the age of 38, while attending a seminary in Indiana, Angie was asked to teach on a [Navajo] reservation in New Mexico. Because she had nothing else to do, and she read James Fennimore Cooper as a child, she decided to go. For more than four decades, she lived in a tiny, off-white home with three rooms. Her focus in life has never been on things. "When you love things, you use people," she says. "I've got enough. More than enough. The Bible says, 'With food and raiment, be satisfied.' "And," she adds, "a little gas for (my) pick-up truck thrown in on the side." She is, for the most part, isolated from the world. The nearest hint of (what we call) civilization is the town of Cuba, a narrow, bony village that clings to Interstate 44, some thirty miles from the mission. There's a gas station there that gives away free showers with every fill-up.

Angie is not complaining. There's an occasional flare up of arthritis. Every once in a while her back goes out on her. But, nothing serious. But, Angie Garber is not without her concerns. It is no easy life God has chosen for her ... "When I first came here to serve," she says, "I just thought this was the most desolate place in the world. I called it a desert." Now she calls it an oasis.

In such an environment, Angie has learned that personal value and purpose must flow exclusively from a relationship with Jesus Christ. "Your joy has to come from the Lord. If you didn't love the Lord, you couldn't work or serve here," [she says].

That is why, every morning, for more than thirty years, [Angie] has climbed into her pick-up truck and made her rounds to people she has come to love. She no longer calls herself a missionary to these people. She would rather be called their friend.

"The only heart that can love," Angie says, "is the one that is broken. You wouldn't have much love if you couldn't share the heartaches. You get so much of a reward when you love others. People take you in as one of their own. You always feel special when you are loved."

Angie, hunched over against a cold wind, makes her way through a fence into a garden. A man named Ben is working the frozen ground. Spring is just months away. If there's one thing the Navajo knows well it is that a proper garden depends on preparation.

They retreat into a porch filled with his collections: dried flowers, bones and rocks, things that mean a lot to [Ben] -- ancient reminders. Angie begins reading from her Navajo Bible. Ben is old. His face is etched. He smiles slightly. His life has been transformed by the love of God. Just a few years ago, after doing time in prison for killing his wife, he came into a relationship with Jesus Christ. "I can't understand that kind of love," Ben says, shaking his head. Angie, as she has for more than four decades, continues on in the work of God. (Taken from Descending Into Greatness by Bill Hybels and Rob Wilkins. Copyright (c) 1993 by Bill Hybels and Ron Wilkins. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House).

Jesus said, "I am the bread of life." Jesus is the Bread that satisfies our deep-seated spiritual hunger. It seems to me, hearing that story told by Bill Hybels about his friend, Angie Garber, that Angie has learned where to find Bread and how to pass it on. It seems to me that her life, largely empty of possessions and honors, is still quite full. Full to the brim. What Jesus offered Angie is what he offers each of us: a Savior Life Diet. He's the Savior who offers us fullness of life through him. Angie took him up on it and found Bread that sustains, Bread she can share.

What about us? All of us, myself included, need to look at our lives. All of us, myself included, need to ask ourselves, "What am I striving for? What's important to me: things, honor, recognition, titles, or something and someone else?" Jesus offers us the Savior Life Diet. Have we taken him up on it? Will we?.