Copyright\u00a0 by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
What do we do when we feel like something necessary to having a full life is missing from our experience and has been for years? I\u2019m not talking about something trivial, something minor like a non-essential material possession or some rarely given talent that we do not happen to possess. What if we are without a spouse or children or a career that seems to have any eternal value? What if the thing we are without appears to us as being an integral part of what God created to make us whole human beings?<\/p>\n
Many Christians live lives that seem radically incomplete because one or more of things like this are not present and do not appear likely to be present anytime soon. In their absence what is <\/em>present is a sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness, and a gnawing feeling of frustration. Millions of people who profess Christ as their Lord and Savior know what it is to exist day in and day out in a state of depression that is directly related to having what they are certain are unmet needs in their lives.<\/p>\n The Bible, of course, does not promise us spouses, children and careers that fulfill us the way we think they ought. What the Bible does promise is that those needs which really are needs will be met in us if we seek first, as Christ taught us to do, \u201cthe Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness.\u201d The implication in that promise is that God will provide what is truly necessary if we put Him first in our lives.<\/p>\n To be sure, that is difficult for a lonely, childless or unemployed believer to accept because it implies something else, two things actually. One is that we may not be truly putting God first and the other is that, even if we are, the things we think are needs are actually wants, at least for the moment. No serious Christian likes to think either of these is true about them. No one wants to think they are not seeking enough after the Lord and no one wants to think the thing they desire to the point of desperation isn\u2019t a real need. But that is the implication of \u201cseek ye first.\u201d There is no getting around it.<\/p>\n God is not in the habit of making reality fit our idea of what it should be. Accepting hard truths about the difficulty of life in a fallen world is part of what it means to be Christian. The fact that \u201clife is difficult\u201d, as author M. Scott Peck once began one of his more popular books, is something we must either reconcile ourselves to or find ourselves embittered. There is no getting around that too.<\/p>\n I do not write this to be deliberately harsh (at least I hope that\u2019s not the case). I write it because even the absence of what we think we cannot live without is, in fact, something with which we can live. Beyond that we can find in our dilemma the path to repentance from wrong priorities or wrong ideas about what is truly necessary in this life. Like so many other adversities the sense of missing out on something \u201cessential\u201d in our present existence can prove to be a path to wisdom and maybe even contentment, both of which are great blessings.<\/p>\n It is something to think about the next time we are certain we are being unfairly denied by the God we call our Own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Copyright\u00a0 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved What do we do when we feel like something necessary to having a full life is missing from our experience and has been for years? I\u2019m not talking about something trivial, something minor like a non-essential material possession or some rarely given talent that we do not happen… <\/p>\n