The Challenge Of Living In A World That Can Not Fulfill

​You were made for another world.

If you're like me, you didn't first encounter this truth in another world, you encountered it in this one.

You encountered it when you discovered that no matter how much you chased the good life here, the fulfilled life here, the more you chased the filling of your cup from all that this world has to offer, the more you came to realize that this world is completely incapable of filling your cup.

You encountered it when you realized the more you addressed your emptiness by chasing something to help you cope with emptiness in this world instead of turning to the one who deeply loves us in another world, the more your emptiness became a darker kind of emptiness.

Paul tells us in the bible, don't turn to wine, where you will only find excess, but be filled instead with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus didn't scold the woman at the well for all the empty ways she was trying to fill her cup, but instead offered to fill her cup with a love that would always leave her feeling filled.

So many of us get left feeling empty not because we aren't trying hard to fill, but because we are trying hard to fill with things that are incapable of filling.

Alcohol can fill a glass, but alcohol also leaves you feeling like I need another drink.

And another one.

It's the nature of most addictions - they lure you in with a promise of filling you before turning on you with their truth, the truth that they never want you to be feeling like you've had enough of them.

We have a lot of systems and institutions that take advantage of this reality.

Churches, politics, even our interpersonal relationships with one another - they often start with the promise that I will fix your world, I will make you feel whole, I will be the one who will always look out for you - only to in the end leave you feeling as incomplete as ever.

Yet, having no other world to turn to, we often double down on the broken promises of this one, why not, we might concede, at least these broken promises look and feel like someone or something fighting to fill me.

I confess, I did not discover another world in my life - I did not discover the Holy Spirit - by first walking through the doors of that spirit and introducing myself. I found it by trying every other door in this world - I don't know that I left any un-knocked on - and becoming exhausted by the emptiness found behind every single one of them.

It is the nature of this another world, I believe, to not be threatened by the places we turn to instead of it in our search for love and fulfillment. It is the nature of this another world to know that it is in our deepest emptiness we often discover our greatest fulfillment.

It is in our deepest thirst that this another world has a chance to show up and leave our thirst forever quenched.

Quenched, that is, with the exception of the thirst we come to have for the love of a God who understands greater than any other world the true nature of the thirsty and often painful lives we have lived.

The God who understands better than any other world what it feels like to be forever lost and then forever found.

The God who loves nothing more than to have his creation overcome with the feeling of never having to chase again.

Never having to feel their worlds toppled by this world.

I discovered that coming through a back door to another world, I am sure.

But I am sure I am no more thankful for any door in my life.