Today’s article is another installment in Brother P.’s column, “Lessons From the Nursing Home.”

According to Merriam-Webster, “cachexia” is “general physical wasting and malnutrition usually associated with chronic disease.”

In the nursing home, this word “cachexia” is a diagnosis that we see given to a person who is skinny beyond belief. We often call a skin-and-bones person “cachexic” (which is not really a word).

People can become cachexic many different ways: don’t have food, can’t eat food, can’t digest food, or something else is using up more calories than the person can intake.

In the scriptures, spiritual things are sometimes referred to as food. “And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).

I wonder if we are at times cachexic spiritually:

• Don’t have the food. (Skip church for “important things” like “stayed out too late.”)
• Can’t eat the food. (Got to church but decided to sit in another room talking to a friend.)
• Can’t digest the food. (Made it into the church service, but didn’t get anything because distracted by Facebook.)
• Caloric loss. (Learned a lot from the Sunday sermon, but then it got lost because I never put the principles to use, forgot the point, and went back to living with my priorities on the wrong things.)

When God looks at us, I wonder if He sees a cachexic soul, malnourished, starving, skin and bones?

This article has undergone ministry review and approval.