Filling the Hole

            A week ago I wrote that sometimes it is by denying ourselves that we truly find ourselves.  I want to expand on that a little bit.

            I’ll warn you that what follows is a theory.  It’s speculation.  You certainly don’t have to agree with it.  I just ask that you think about it.  It makes a certain amount of sense to me.  Maybe it will to you, too.

            All of us have certain things that we’re passionate about, things we really enjoy doing.  Sometimes they’re serious things.  Sometimes they’re frivolous things.  For most of us, there are probably some of both.  People are passionate about sports, crafts, cars, cooking, movies, music, work, television, hunting, clothes, and on and on and on.  If we made a list, it would be never-ending, because everyone has something they’re passionate about, and there’s someone who’s passionate about everything.  There might even be some people reading this who are passionate about the church.

            But why do we have these passions?  I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything wrong with them—I have a lot of passions myself.  But why do we have them?  Why did God give us passions for all these different kinds of things?

            Here’s the theory.  Humans, while we’re on earth, feel separated from God.  That leaves us feeling incomplete.  One way of putting it is that there’s a hole in the heart of each human that only God can truly fill.  The trouble is that, while we’re on earth, that separation keeps us from allowing God to actually fill that hole.

            The hole is still there, though.  And it hurts.  And so we try desperately to fill it with something.  We become passionate about baseball or about fishing or about shopping or whatever.  We try to use those things to fill that hole in our hearts that comes from God not being there.

            And these things help.  Sometimes they help a lot.  But they never quite get the job done.  No matter what we’re passionate about, and no matter how passionate we are about it, we never quite get that hole filled.  It’s still there, and there’s nothing we can do to make it go away.  We can make it hurt less, for a while.  But the hole is still there, and none of our passions can ever fill it. Only God can.  And while, again, there’s nothing wrong with the passions we have, if we get too carried away with them, if we try too hard to make them fill that hole, we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble.  We start trying to pound the square peg of our passions into the round hole left by God, and it simply won’t work.

            Passions are fine, but if we carry them too far, we don’t leave room for God.  God gets crowded out of our lives.  Sometimes, then, what we need to do is pull back on our passions.  Sometimes we need to deny ourselves some of the things we’re passionate about, so that we leave room for the Holy Spirit to come in.  When we do that, we become who we really are, because it’s only the Holy Spirit who can fill that God-sized hole.

            It’s okay to be passionate about earthly things.  But it’s only when that God-sized hole in our hearts is filled by the Holy Spirit that we truly become who we are, who we were created to be.  So during Lent, and always, let’s open our hearts to the Holy Spirit.  Let’s let that God-sized hole be filled so we can truly be who God created us to be.