Desire & Purpose

Last Friday my wife and I enjoyed a gorgeous spring hike up Schloss Mountain. Flowering bushes filled the path with fragrance. Add blue skies, white clouds, low humidity, and mountain valley views and it was a bath for the senses.

We have traveled to some visually stunning places, and have sometimes asked the locals, “do you lose the thrill?” Decades ago a group of us were riding in the back of a pickup on a mission trip in Arizona, enthralled at the wide open sky and desert surroundings. The locals teens in the truck with us were looking around wondering what it was we were seeing. Conversely, a relative from Mexico had come to live with us for a few months and kept remarking how green everything was! “Maryland, green?” was my response. “I guess it is.”

As we hiked along the ridge line on Schloss Mountain, appreciating the stunning scenery, I reflected on man’s low capacity to remain enthralled. God is merciful in having creation perpetually shifting. Cycles of light and life make our surroundings always new to some degree. But think of something inanimate you purchased because it gave you joy, which in time became part of the background. Why are we so quickly bored?

I remember a film which recapped scientists’ discoveries on how heroin affects the human body. They learned that heroin broke down into subunits of morphine. The morphine molecule has a very unique shape, like a plug, which only works by connecting with a very specific receptor. This led to the question - why is the human body designed with a unique receptor to morphine? (Side note: that led to understanding endorphins and enkephalins.)

I ask a similar question: what is it in our design which makes us so quickly dissatisfied? It is because we were created to be fulfilled only by an eternal inexhaustible beauty. The story of human history can be viewed through this lens of man striving to be satisfied in anything but God, usually with disastrous consequences. God has “made everything beautiful in its time” (Eccl. 3:11), but it all fades, ages, passes. We are made for the eternal.

This past Sunday Robin shared on Preparing for Pentecost.  For me, the message hit a similar cord. Christianity’s timeline is linear, not circular. We are moving towards something, not lost in repeated futility. The prison camps of WWII revealed how man cannot long survive meaninglessness. Men perished in despair, or were driven mad simply by being forced to repeat the same arduous task of digging a large hole only to fill it in again.

However Jesus promised: “...this gospel... will be proclaimed throughout the whole world... and then the end will come.” (Matt 24:14)

There is an end point, a finish line in view. The question is, am I aligned and engaged with that end point? It’s one thing to acknowledge the goal, it’s another to be walking towards it.

These two thoughts: a) our hearts can only be satisfied in God, and b) Christ will return at the end of the age, converge into one truth: this world is not our home. Complete satisfaction is not to be found here. Oh, we have been called out of death and darkness. And as believers we are to be experiencing increased freedom and revelation in this world (Proverbs 4:18). But for us to experience what we have been redeemed for, earth, the heavens, and our physical bodies will need to be recreated, made new.

Which leads me back to a very practical question: Do I live in line with that reality? And more specifically, what is the Holy Spirit leading me into currently as part of this forward looking journey? Life is not just to be enjoyed, or endured. We are born again to purpose and calling (Phil. 3:14-16; Eph. 2:10; Heb. 3:1).

By nature, we are driven to find fulfillment. May the Spirit help us follow our savior’s path who said:

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”  John 4:34