Soul Hunger 2

From Shattered Dreams:

The highest dream we could ever dream, the wish that if granted would make us happier than any other blessing, is to know God.  The problem is that we don't believe this idea is true.  We assent to it in our heads.  But we don't feel it in our hearts.

We can't stop wanting to be happy.  And that urge should prompt no apology.  We were created for happiness.  Our souls, therefore, long for whatever we think will provide the greatest possible pleasure.

But in our foolishness, we look for that experience in all the wrong places.  To use biblical language, we dig broken cisterns and walk right by the fresh spring of water that is God.

Even though we may long for legitimately good things, when they elude us, we discover that the greatest blessing is no longer the blessing of a good life.  It is now the blessing of an encounter with God.  But we don't view things that way.  So God goes to work to help us see more clearly.  One way He works is to allow our lower dreams to shatter.  He lets us hurt and doesn't make it better.  We suffer while He stands by and does nothing to help, at least nothing that we're aware we want Him to do.

In fact, what He's doing while we suffer, is leading us into the depths of our being, into the center of our soul where we feel our strongest passions.  It's there that we discover our desire for God.  We begin to feel a desire to know Him that not only survives all our pain, but actually thrives in it until that desire becomes more intense than our desire for all the good things we still want.  Through the pain of shattered lower dreams, we wake up to the realization that we want an encounter with God more than we want the blessings of life.  And that begins a revolution in our lives.

In the meantime, our experience is often that when we feel most desperately our need for God, when drudgery characterizes our days while beauty, life and freedom seem out of reach, when we long for His intervention, He seems absent...indifferent to our plight...unmoved by our struggles.   He may leave us in a dark and low place for a very long time. 

What does it mean to hope in God as we continue to live in a world where good dreams shatter and God seems to do nothing about it?  In this place of darkness and seeming abandonment, we experience a soul hunger that creates an opportunity to discover our true hope.  This may not include the elimination of pain or even an experience of pleasure that exceeds pain.  But pain always has a purpose and it WILL do its work.  It will stir up an appetite for the better hope of knowing God well enough to love Him above everything else and to trust Him no matter what happens.

This process carries us down a road that doesn't feel productive and helpful.  For crying out loud, we want to FEEL BETTER!!  But there is no shortcut to joy and the path to it is usually, if not always, one of suffering.  We may prefer to remain naively happy. Our experience of happiness is not entirely wrong, but it is both innocent and shallow, rooted in optimism and  a fool's arrogant spirit of entitlement.

In His severe mercy, God takes away the good to create an appetite for the better.

As was the case with the Israelites, this journey through the wilderness is to "test you, to prove you, and to show you what is in your hearts."  While we're on this journey, we do well to remind ourselves of some central truths that will help us to endure.

To be cont'...