There’s Got to Be More
Do you ever have the feeling that you are chasing something in life that won’t fully satisfy you? Pay attention to that feeling. It’s from God.
We’re not just talking about substance abuse issues, although drinking and pursuing other addictions are certainly ways of chasing something futile. But we’ve also known a lot of “good church people” who sit in a service every week—or who preach from a pulpit to those people—who feel themselves to be far from God. They’re “successful” or “put together” or “righteous” on the outside, but they’re missing God on the inside. They keep busy with religious practices and work, school, or family, but it just isn’t enough. They long for God to feel real to them.
That longing is the first spiritual awakening for all of us finding our way back to God: “There’s got to be more.”
When you long for a love that is deep and satisfying, when you want to give yourself to something that will truly make a difference, or when you seek answers to life’s most difficult questions, you are looking for God. You’ve really got two options: you can keep searching to fill these longings on your own, or you can look to the One who gave you those longings in the first place.
Our longing for real love goes all the way back to how the human race was made in the first place. God intended that we experience his love both directly from him and through others we relate to in a healthy way. What we long for, God doesn’t just have but actually God is. He is love and he pursues us with love.
We’ve heard it said that every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is really looking for God. If you are knocking on the door of some self-destructive behavior or relationship, you might actually have arrived at an important point in your journey back to God. Why? Because the disappointment you inevitably feel in cheap substitutes will make you wonder where you can find real love. Will you open yourself up to letting God fill your longing to love and be loved.
The next in our breakthroughs in our journey back to God we call the awakening to regret. You look at your life one morning and realize that, for all your best efforts, you’ve made a mess of things. You’re filled with disappointment and remorse. And now that you see things more clearly, you’d love another chance. But you’re not sure you have it coming.
Come to think of it, why would you?
But stay with us.
Inside each of us is the conviction that we came from goodness and love and that we’re made for more of it. When we hit bottom and realize what a mess we have made of this life, and what a mess life has made of us, our reaction is to say, “I wish I could start over.”
The beautiful thing is, you can start over. Your intuition about your origins in goodness and love is absolutely correct. God allows you to start over again.
Most of us, when we’re ready to start over, simply want to go back to the life we had before everything went south. But God has other ideas. He doesn’t just want to help us get back to that better life as we imagine it. He wants us to experience a different kind of life altogether. It’s not just your future that changes when you find your way back to God but your past and your present as well.
Are you ready to be done with living out a string of days with pain from the past, no purpose in your present, and no confidence about your future? Your journey away from regret and toward your home in God also takes you toward a deeper, truer life—the kind of life that invites you to start over today and begin living the way God always dreamed you could live . . . forever.
