What do we do with the ache that does not leave, even after we have prayed, hoped, and tried to move on?

What do we do when life scatters us, but some hunger still remains that no distraction can satisfy?

Acts tells us that after Stephen’s death, persecution broke open the early Church and scattered the believers. At first glance, this looks like defeat. Yet the very scattering becomes the road by which the Word spreads.

What looked like an ending became a beginning. The Gospel does not hide the pain, but it refuses to let pain have the final word.

And then Jesus speaks: “I am the bread of life.” Not the bread of quick fixes. Not the bread of temporary relief. Not the bread of applause, control, or endless achievement. He is the bread that speaks to the deepest hunger in the human heart, the hunger to be held, known, sustained, and not abandoned. He does not promise a life without wounds. He promises himself in the middle of them.

This is the strange courage of Easter faith: that even in scattering, God is gathering; even in loss, God is feeding; even in uncertainty, God is present. The world tells us that broken things are finished. Jesus says broken things can become bread.
So maybe the question for today is not whether we are scattered, or hungry, or uneasy. Maybe the question is this: what if the very ache we are trying to escape is the place where Christ is already waiting to feed us?