My soul thirsts for you,
- Psalm 63
Desire, like pain, can be hard to diagnose accurately. It can come from many places at once and make it hard to distinguish its source. We can feel a desire and have trouble knowing where it's coming from. We can also associate a desire with something far removed from its actual source. Psychoanalysis recognizes how common this is and digs around the unconscious for answers.
The idea of a “God-shaped hole” in human beings, both individually and collectively, is almost a cliché in Christian circles. It is a general answer to the question, “What am I missing?” Unfortunately, it is not very helpful. Not because it is inaccurate, but because we do not understand what that hole represents. The absence we feel so keenly is, at its deepest level, the absence of a person. We wander in the lonely wilderness of our lives and forget our most important and intimate companion of all: God himself, who has come to walk among us as a human being in Jesus and who surrounds and fills our lives.
In the wilderness of this world, God's kind of love—the kind of love we were made for—is always available, just as God himself is constantly available through Jesus and his Spirit. Love may not be available in the way we want it, however. In this present age, it is available like water in wells and oases. It is available to those who begin to recognize that nothing but God will truly satisfy, to those who seek him with their whole heart, like a thirsty person in the desert.
This is the “way of love” that Paul encourages us to follow. This is the key to God's kingdom among us and to his will for us: to seek him as though our lives depend on it. The desperation we must have is not because God requires it, but because we so desperately need God. We need Someone with whom we share our whole life, as individuals and in communities, and no one else can take his place. That is the difference between perishing in the wilderness and entering God's promised kingdom today.
