...We're still too full of ourselves

I have always admired my friend @KatDish. She like so many others have reached out to me in my darkest hours. She left the comment below in response to one of my recent blog posts.

My friend and pastor wrote a series of posts entitled "Full". In part one, he talked about the "God-shaped hole" concept we often use to describe our tendency to fill ourselves up with everything except for God. I found his research interesting:

"What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object,that is to say, only by God Himself."

-Blaise Pascal - The Pensées
#425, Section VII. From "Morality and Doctrine"

Unless I'm mistaken, this is the actual passage that has been reduced to "Everybody has a God-shaped hole in their life." Even if it's not, I'm glad I found it, because this statement more accurately describes the kind of longing that I have known. I know without a doubt that the absence of God in my life would not produce a "God-shaped hole." Instead, it would leave me with a massive, gaping wound from which the entirety of myself as I know it would be drained. Without God I would be empty.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I (Jesus) have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." - John 10:10

So why is it then, that someone can be a Christ-follower and agree that they would be empty without God, but also have to admit that they don't exactly feel full with Him?

Maybe we don't feel "full" of God because we're still too full of ourselves.

You'll find more of the great KatDish at her blog.