Embrace The Hole

By worldly standards, I have been blessed with a measure of success and should be satisfied. I have a job that I enjoy (most of the time), colleagues and employees that I enjoy being around, and a wonderful wife and children. I have traveled, I have seen great cities, I purchased things that I did not need, and later regretted it.  I have been able to travel and do things that my parents could not have afforded when I was a child. Objectively, when looking at the surface, I should be fulfilled. However, when the noise quiets, there is a hole. We live in an age where there is endless noise around us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are constantly being hassled by our smart phones, addictively checking our Facebook posts, and leaving on the television just to continue the “background noise.” It is rare that we actually experience a moment of true silence and reflection (especially when you have kids). I suspect those on their deathbeds experience only silence and reflection and this is when they often recognize that they have wasted so much of their lives on things that did not matter.

When I recognize this hole, I want to fill it. I want to put on some background noise, distract myself by binge watching some television show on Netflix, and do anything I can to avoid the fact that there is a gaping hole inside of me. I believe many turn to alcohol, drugs, excessive eating, pornography, unhealthy relationships, or any other activity that will give a “high” or distraction in order to temporarily avoid the hole. I am guilty of many of these as well.

All of these actions end up with consequences we regret. There are endless commercials, commentaries, and people out there willing to entice you to try their “solution” to the hole. After a while you realize that it’s all garbage. That purchase will rust, decay, and break. The twelve-step program didn’t work out. In fact, none of it works. The hole is still there. I know it. I feel it. I bet you do too. For many years I would even deny the very existence of the hole. I would tell myself that I have spiritual leaders guiding me, and as long as I am checking off the list of things they tell me I need to do, then I am good and there is nothing left for me to pursue. I should shut up and be happy, or at least pretend to be until I am. I know I am not the only one in this boat. Until recently, I never realized what this hole was. But I think all of us have it.

So, for the three of you who are still reading this post, I’m going to get preachy, but bear with me. I have heard some call it a “God-shaped hole.” Studying the Bible, I realized that history is filled with people in the exact same boat. They have insecurities, they have weaknesses, and they are broken. They have a gaping hole in their lives and nothing they do permanently fills it. God addresses them, encourages them, encourages US, to come and fill this hole. “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?… Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live” (Isaiah 55:2-3). In John 4, Christ spoke with a Samaritan woman, approaching the well near where he sat. This woman, all commentators agree, was an outcast. She was coming at the well during the time of day when no one else would be there. She was a social pariah whose immorality was likely well known in the community. She was broken; she was the exposed version of many of us.

Christ spoke to her, which shocked her. Not only was she a social outcast, but she was a woman and a Samaritan, someone a Jewish male would not normally engage in conversation. He asked her for a drink. She replied in shock that a Jew was even asking such a thing. He responded, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” John 4:10. What did he mean by living water? He clarifies in verse 13, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Soul satisfaction. That is what he is talking about; completeness – the fulfillment that ALL of us are longing for and cannot satisfy. A thirst that is finally quenched; a hole that is finally filled. He confirms this point in the next few verses where she is exposed as a woman who has had five husbands and now was living with a man to whom she was not married, a big societal and religious no-no. Like all of us, she had a need. She needed to be needed. She needed to be loved. She had a hole in her heart and, like all of us, she kept trying to fill it; in this case, with husband after husband, never being satisfied, always thirsting. For the first time in her life, from coming to Christ, she would be fulfilled. She immediately then ran to tell all of her friends about him.

So what am I getting at here?

Simple. You cannot fill the hole.

There is literally nothing you can purchase, no group you can join, no action you can take that will ever, ever fill that hole. But there is one who can fill it for you and is willing to do so if you just ask him. Regardless of your spiritual state, your emotional baggage, your complicated history, he will fill that hole or quench that thirst like nothing else can satisfy. Only coming to God through Christ will make you complete. And don’t think for a second you have to “get your act together” before you can come to Him. He wants you as you are. He wants me as I am: broken and very aware of my brokenness. He didn’t tell the Samaritan woman that she had to clean up her life before he would give her the living water; he told her that all she needed to do was ask. So, is my hole filled? No, but it’s getting there. For the first time in my life I can feel the thirst being quenched, and the garbage that I used to attempt to fill the hole with becomes less appetizing every day. I know this is preachy, but I also know that I am not the only one who has sat in the quiet and felt the emptiness that God placed there. I know I am not the only one who has tried to fill it with everything but the one thing that would actually do the job; the One who would actually satisfy my soul. So what next? Embrace the hole. Embrace the thirst. Use it for what it is: a tool, a motivator, to bring you into relationship with your Creator.