Made for Thyself

Week of Monday, March 19, 2001

Of all the things that one might hope to accomplish in this life, nothing compares even remotely to knowing and loving God, and, what is even more revolutionary, being known and loved by Him without conditions or limits. Listen to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for in these I delight” (9:23–24). At their best, wisdom, power, and wealth—so envied in the Silicon Valley—can never fulfill what they promise or what the human soul ultimately longs for and needs; at their worst they corrupt us horribly.

The Christian story contains a different narrative and plot. It describes this knowledge of God in a number of different ways. To know God is to experience eternal life or an abundant life. Loving God and being loved by Him convey to us a new birth, a new life, a new self, a transformed self. This is the difference between merely living (bios) and being truly and fully alive (zoa), between feeling at home in the world and feeling utterly estranged, homeless, or at sea. There is no greater tragedy, then, to lose this love, the love from God and for God, and no greater gain. For what could it possibly profit a person to gain the world but lose his way in life?

I believe that, in our best moments, and even though it is not always apparent, everyone longs for this divine love. That is, despite our apparent outward differences of culture, socio-economic status, power, intelligence, vocation, or any other characteristic, we are all fundamentally the same. As a friend of mine once remarked, we all laugh at weddings and cry at funerals. We all long to love and to be loved in an ultimate way. This fundamental longing is a sign, signal or clue to the meaning of our existence that we should take very seriously. Frederick Buechner calls this wishful thinking: “sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it” (Wishful Thinking, p. 120). We all wish to be loved, unconditionally, and wish to offer love, and this deep wishing tells us something important about what it means to be truly and fully human.

I think it was Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) who once remarked that we all have within us a God-shaped vacuum. In his autobiography Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis writes eloquently of the stabs of Joy and Longing that he eventually understood as the call of God on His life. In one of the most famous sentences in all of Christian history, Saint Augustine (354–430) remarked in the very first paragraph of his Confessions, “Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” If you want to participate in the Christian story of loving and being loved—whether as a rookie or a veteran—then take for yourself Augustine's prayer found just a few pages later: “Turn us, O God of Hosts, show us Thy countenance, and we shall be whole. For wherever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, even though it is riveted upon things beautiful.”

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2001 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.