I seem to find myself in a constant
state of restlessness. It often feels nearly impossible to quiet my mind and
still my spirit.
Okay—I confess—it’s likely that I have way too much going on
in my life all at once. Can you relate? I bet you can!
The
Bible speaks volumes about our common experience of restlessness and dis-ease
as human beings.
Eve’s restlessness in the Garden of Eden was the byproduct of
Satan’s diabolical scheme to sow seeds of doubt in her mind about the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:1-7).
Abram
and Sarai’s (later renamed Abraham and Sarah) impatience during their long wait
for a promised son resulted in them taking things into their own hands. They
foolishly decided to use their Egyptian servant Hagar as a surrogate mother to
provide a child (Gen. 16, 21)—with grievous results.
Jacob’s
dissatisfaction and power-hungry-pursuit in being the second-born led to his
manipulative and deceptive behaviors in stealing both his older twin Esau’s
birthright and first-born blessing (Gen. 25:29-34; Gen. 27).
Israel’s
murmuring in the wilderness while impatiently waiting for Moses to descend from
Mt. Sinai from his sacred summit with God resulted in their persuasion of Aaron
to create for them the Golden Calf (Gen. 32), invoking God’s displeasure.
Samson’s
impulsiveness led him to pursue idolatrous Philistine women as wives and
lovers, resulting in his demise at the hands of Delilah (Judges 14-16), when he
revealed to her the secret of his superhuman strength.
David’s
boredom and lust caused him to become an adulterer when he allowed his passion
to consume his attraction to Bathsheba, causing him to plot her husband Uriah’s
murder (2 Sam. 11). David’s punishment was the tragic death of his baby boy (2
Sam. 12).
Solomon’s
edginess, despite his unparalleled wisdom and wealth, resulted in him turning from
the Lord through his ill-advised marriages with many non-Israelite, idolatrous
women (1 Kings 11). His haunting, self-reflective words penned in his old age
are eye-opening in Ecclesiastes as he recognized “all is vanity and a chasing
after the wind.”
As
finite beings, each one of us, remains in a state of incompleteness, of incessant
searching. In fact, we are most vulnerable when we achieve some great desire
and recognize its ultimate futility.
We all struggle with “Divine
Dissatisfaction,” a condition no carnal or temporal happiness can cure. The
things we feverishly pursue are usually inadequate substitutions of the
spiritual things which we actually desire beneath the surface. But as this-worldly
material “things” they never fully satisfy our longings within our souls.
You
see, human desire, the quest for something that will satisfy us, points beyond
finite objects and imperfect persons. It points through these objects and
persons towards their real goal in God himself. Education, qualifications, prestigious
careers, relationships, money and stuff—none of these can ever fulfill that for
which we ultimately search.
This
is the paradox of hedonism—a view which holds that pursuit of pleasure is the
ultimate good. But worldly pleasure is unable to satisfy the soul. This is the
“Divine dissatisfaction” which points us back to God.
To the Samaritan woman at
the well, Jesus said (in John 4:13-14), “Everyone
who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water
that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give
him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Only
God himself can satiate our spiritual hunger and quench our spiritual thirst.
St.
Augustine prayed: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are
restless until they find their rest in you.”
We have been created by God and
experience a deep sense of longing for Him which only he can satisfy. The Psalmist
expressed this concept vividly: “As the
deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you” (Psalm 42:1).
We
enter into the life of faith and discover God through belief in that which is
beyond us. We can't build any worthwhile kind of life unless we have God at the core—as the very foundation of
our existence.
