When Life is Like a Box of Crackers

I have never once stood in my laundry room and thought, “This is the abundant life.” I have, however, stood there staring at a pile of damp towels and wondered, Is this it?

Not in a dramatic, crisis-of-faith kind of way. There was no rebellion. No secret doubt. No slow drift into indifference. I still loved my husband. I still loved my kids. I still loved God. I was going to church, praying, serving, working, showing up for all the things that make up a faithful life. On the outside, nothing had collapsed. On the inside, though, something felt strangely flat.

Somewhere along the way, life started tasting like saltines.

No, Forrest, not a box of delectable, surprising, delightful chocolates. Saltines: Functional. Dry. Technically food.

They’ll keep you alive, I suppose.

But no one makes movie quips about saltines.

That’s what startled me. I hadn’t left God. I hadn’t renounced anything. I hadn’t wandered into some dramatic moral failure. I was simply living a perfectly responsible, perfectly faithful, perfectly ordinary life that somehow felt monotonous and never-ending. The laundry kept cycling. The calendar kept filling. The prayers were still being said. But somewhere along the way, the sense of vitality had thinned.

Around that time, I found myself reading, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1, ESV). The language was intense. Thirst. Fainting. A dry and weary land. It described a kind of longing that felt foreign to me in that season. I wasn’t thirsty. I wasn’t desperate. I was just steady. Steady in the way you are when you’re folding towels and mentally planning dinner at the same time.

Because if I was honest, I wasn’t thirsty.

I was just…snacking. On saltines.

Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches… apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5, ESV). I knew that verse. I believed it. But it struck me that you can be a very busy branch. You can produce leaves. You can look healthy enough from a distance. And yet, if you stop paying attention to the life that is actually flowing, you can mistake activity for vitality.

That was the quiet realization forming in me. Nothing had exploded. Nothing had fallen apart. I simply wasn’t experiencing the kind of aliveness Scripture seemed to describe. The machine was running. The house was functioning. My faith was intact. But everything tasted a little bland.

Psalm 63 does not begin with a plan. It begins with thirst. With a soul that knows it was made for more than maintenance.

Maybe flatness isn’t failure. Maybe it is hunger.

And maybe hunger is not something to fix, but something to notice.