Longing

"If the world of chalupas and dandruff shampoo and Viagra is all there is, how come I have hungers that none of those things ever seem to satisfy?"

What an appropriate chapter for me to be reading while I’m in the middle of the "Thirty Days of Nothing" challenge. This chapter is exactly why I’m participating in it. Although I think being more conscious of world hunger and poverty are both very honorable things and we all need to start being part of the solution instead of part of the problem, I also know that until I fix the hunger in my own soul I’ll never be able to truly help others fix theirs. It’s impossible to be part of the problem AND part of the solution at the same time.

So when Tonia issued the "Thirty Days of Nothing" challenge, I jumped all over it. I’ve been raised in the original era of mass media and I’ve been feeding on a steady diet of it ever since. I get it from television, radio, magazines, billboards, shopping malls, flyers, newspapers and mail. I have spent my entire life thinking that "if only I made more money" or "if only I drove that car" or "if only I could get him to cut my hair" or "if only I could stick to this diet"…

Well, I gave it my best shot. It took me 45 years to figure out those things weren’t what I was missing in my life and they aren’t the reason I wasn’t happy.

"We tell ourselves that this meal, this promotion, this drug, this one-night stand will finally make us happy. But they don’t because they can’t. It’s the wrong food. We’re feeling our way around a dark
room, groping for a happiness that’s always out of reach. If only we would take the time to turn on the light, we’d see how empty the room really is. We’re looking in the wrong place."

I often wonder why this life on earth comes before our life in heaven. Why not just create us in heaven and let us live amongst the angels, worshipping God for all eternity? Why must we go through all this other stuff first? I think it has something to do with the dichotomy of life. You don’t understand joy unless you’ve known sorrow. You don’t appreciate food unless you’ve gone hungry. You can’t understand that fullness is only found in Jesus Christ unless you’re a sinner in need of a Savior.

And so we spend our lives here on earth swimming upstream, fighting against the current and against the ways of the world. We try endlessly to fill our souls up with the perfect this and the perfect that and, in the end, we realize that nothing in this world is perfect…

Except for the perfect love we come to find in Him.