An Old Problem
Why does life feel unsatisfying? It really does, doesn’t it? And more often than we wish that it did. It’s an old problem, and one of my favorite places in the Bible is the book of Ecclesiastes, where this guy had it all. He had a chance to do everything he set out to do. He had a chance to enjoy all the pleasures he ever wanted to enjoy. He had more money than anybody. He had more wisdom than anybody. He had it all. And he gets to the end of his life, he looks back at it all, and he just says, “Vanity, striving after wind.” It seems to me like the average middle-class American lifestyle now is basically just getting a chance to learn what he learned. What only the upper, upper, upper crust of his ancient world could find out, we now all get a chance to learn because of how comfortable and prosperous the average American middle-class life is.
I’ve been so struck by recent studies that have shown that even as life has gotten so much better in so many different metrics, people feel worse and worse. The better we have it, the more pronounced our depression or, at least, unhappiness. What is that about? I think there’s a lot of mystery to it at one level.
In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.
And I think we’re pouring gas on that fire in modern society more often than not because of one of the biggest lies we’re tempted to believe. Because our society is so consumeristic, we tend to think the answer to the question and the reason we’re so dissatisfied is to say, That thing over there, I haven’t gotten it yet. I’ll have it soon, so let me do whatever it’s going to take to grab that. Then I’ll be good.
We have money, time, and skill at our disposal to keep grabbing for more. And every time we lay hold of something, it is vapor. It’s empty. We have confused our satisfaction problem for a problem of possession, as if owning something could put an end to it. The Bible sees it more as a problem of proximity, where the issue is not so much what we don’t have yet but who we’re not fully with yet.
Because of sin our separation from God affects every part of our experience of his world. Everything good in this world is good because it expresses something of his goodness. So, we experience his goodness in our relationships, in delicious food, and in every beautiful piece of scenery we’ve seen, but we’re always carrying around this sense that we’re cut off from something of that goodness.
We have confused our satisfaction problem for a problem of possession, as if owning something could put an end to it.
Something’s still missing, because it is. We’re not with him, not in the way that Adam and Eve were in the garden, and that memory is etched deeply into us as a craving for more that God promises that one day we will experience.
I think the key now is to see that our goal while we wait for the day he’s promised—when he will be here, when he will be with us, when the whole earth will be full of his glory—is to try to maximize our satisfaction and not think about satisfaction as something that you do have or don’t have. It’s more of a spectrum. You can have more or less satisfaction in any one experience or any one season of life. What can we do to experience more satisfaction, more contentment, less dissatisfaction, or discontent? It comes down to a couple of things.
One is to just go ahead and accept that full satisfaction is impossible. Write off the typical modern solution to this problem as a lie. There is no possession that is ever going to satisfy me. Only God’s presence will do that. It’s all in Psalm 16. If we can reframe our expectations, then we won’t be so surprised when we get something good and it doesn’t seem good enough, and we can more easily start to notice what is good about it and not what isn’t. I think that gets easier when you add it to another strategy, to remember that God has promised us full satisfaction someday that’s rooted in who he is and in the fact that we’ll be with him.
Along the way, he’s giving us taste after taste after taste of that goodness, and things that are never fully ours to own—things that we don’t get to keep forever, things that are going to leave us wanting more but are connected to him and therefore part of a never-ending stream that we’ll one day experience in full—that day is coming. And in the meantime, the dissatisfaction we feel doesn’t have to be all bad. Instead of an enemy, we can see it as a friend that we hang onto, a hunger that we cultivate and that protects us from settling for anything else that’s just going to take the ache away but ultimately distract us from what matters most. We can see it as a kind of friend that leads us on, always looking for the day of his return.
Matthew McCullough is the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.
