Our default assumption is to believe that we already know what we need and what we really want – this is likely because we are prone to believe that how we know ourselves is indisputably accurate . . . even though there is ample proof to the contrary. This lack of self-awareness is attributable to how we evaluate meaning and purpose. An evaluation that is inextricably incubated within our own self-referencing perception of the world, as we have been contextualized within the cultural expectations of conformity . . . including the non-conformist conformity we pretend we are maintaining.
Perhaps this is why we often experience a resident sense of dissatisfaction, ever recalibrating our expectations and desires to the distorted mirror our consumerist culture holds up to us. Or perhaps this dissatisfaction runs deeper as if it were the result of an unnamed longing lurking beneath every desire we have . . . waiting to be recognized. A longing so primal it seeps into everything. Deeper than desire, it can’t simply be tamped down by giving in to our every impulse of desire – which can only lead us to an ever-growing diminishing return . . . until nothing really satisfies. Because it is a longing that points far beyond mere desire – as it points far beyond ourselves.
Bruce Springsteen sang “Everybody’s gotta hungry heart” – about a desire of the heart beyond explanation. In the book of Ecclesiastes, we get the complete run down on how everything in life is full of dissatisfaction and the vanity of chasing after the wind (hevel) – concluding that only when we recognize that God alone, is God and thereby accept his words and decrees as essential to making sense of this world. But for the Christian, St Augustine seems to explain it best “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”.
The conversation Jesus had with the woman at the well (John 4:1-30) is rich with spiritual insight – but this conversation, taking place at Jacob’s well, inescapably becomes a conversation about quenching thirst (vs 7-15). Jesus basically makes the point that we bring an empty cup to the water . . . and then drink that cup dry again. But with the water that Jesus offers – our cup never runs dry. Clearly, this is a metaphor about finding a lasting satisfaction in God, but not in the way we find peripheral satisfaction in transient desires – rather it is a transcendently loving response to our heart’s deepest longings . . . allowing us to submit our every desire into God’s keeping.
As Jesus anticipates the cross, (Matthew 20:20-23) the mother of James and John expresses her desire to see her sons exalted to a place of honor in the kingdom that Jesus is ushering in – to which Jesus says (v22) “You don’t know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” — referring to the cup, that Jesus himself will later that night pray that the Father allow to pass from him (Matthew 26:39). The truth is, we don’t really know what we want – because we don’t really know what it will ultimately cost. But praise be to Jesus Christ, who chose to drink the bitter dregs of that cup until it was empty – so that we could “ . . . know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” ~ Ephesians 3:19.
So we turn our eyes upon Jesus . . .
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