We all know the type. There often seems to be one in every family. Sometimes, entire families are made up of them. Those overachievers, those movers andshakers,men about and the talk of the town, “the guy with the plane.” Often extremely gifted and talented, and more often than not, those type-A personalities that live life precariously close to the edge of it all, ever-pushing and eversearching for, well, something. You might call them thrillseekers, for by all appearances, that is precisely what they are: forever seeking the next big thing, seeking the next adrenaline-charged thrill, the next “immortality project” behind which hopefully lies, well, something. Sadly, there is something rushed and frantic in their going about. Something is not quite right, as if something of consequential substance is somehow missing. Through it all and deep down, they have a keen sense of it. Something is missing.
AfterwinningthreeSuperBowls, football quarterback Tom Brady stoppedlongenoughtoreflect:“Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me? I think it’s got to be more than this. I mean, this isn’t; this can’t be what its all cracked up to be.” Luckily for Brady, he stopped long enough and looked deeply enough to ask the big question in life: What is the purpose of it all? And with that, perhaps, cracked open and peeked behind the door to a whole new realm, a greater realm.
The Christian theologian and writer C. S. Lewis reasoned that a set of innate desires resides within the makeup of all people. These desires, coming upon us quite naturally and without provocation, include desires like hunger and thirst, shelter, and sex, and are desires common to all men in all places throughout history. They are not time-bound nor present in some cultures and absent in others. In that way, they are aspects of what it means to be a human being. For each of these innate desires, thankfully, there are concrete satisfactions. For hunger, there exists food; for thirst, there is water, and so forth. It could even be said, and has been said, that there are no desires natural to man that do not have an available satisfaction. Quite simply, if the natural desire exists, then the satisfaction for that desire exists as well.
But Tom Brady felt something very different. In fact, it seems that for Brady’s desire for ultimate satisfaction, personal peace, and total victory in his life, there is nothing that can satisfy that hollow chasm in his spirit. Nothing in this world, that is. Lewis said it best, “If I find in myself a desire no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Maybe that is the key. Maybe that’s what is missing. Maybe that is what everyone, to some extent or another, is looking for. The fourth-century bishop, Augustine of Hippo, once said to God, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Rest indeed. The seventeenth-century Christian theologian Blaise Pascal noted, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man,” and it is that vacuum that people attempt to shove so many odd-shaped things into.
Even so, it isn’t just Christians, atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “the center of me is always and eternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain, a searching beyond what the world contains.” MaybeTomBradyfeelsdeep in his soul that there is something greater out there for him. Maybe that is so because there is. If every natural desire has a corresponding satisfaction, then maybe Brady is looking in the wrong place. Maybe his deepest satisfaction lies in another realm. And it is not just the Bradys of the world. The most ordinary and common man or woman you encounter on the street has a desire and a longing that cannot be satisfied. And like most movers and shakers at the top of society, they are resigned in their approach to reality, all the while carrying about this sense that something is missing in it all, this sense that there must be something more to it than this—surely!
The critic agrees that life is filled with unfulfilled desires but argues that this is the nature of things in a world where the “wishful thinking” of faith helps people cope with the disappointments of this life. But I do not believe this is true. After all, one of the key pillars of the argument from desire for God’s existence is thatthereisnoinnatehumandesire for which its satisfaction does not exist: food for hunger, water for thirst, and the desire for ultimate meaning and union with the Divine. All the way up the social ladder, reaching up to the elite leaders of the world, and all the way back down again to the lowest being in the ghetto, each and every one is searching for an earthly fix to an eternal problem: a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. But in the dark, quiet solitude, in the depths of personal and private suffering, whispers a still small voice: “Be still and know that I am God,” (Psalms 46:10) “for I am here, I am listening, and I am waiting.”
Gloria in excelsis Deo! Ty B. Kerley, DMin., is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics, and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. Dr. Kerley and his wife Vicki are members of the Waurika church of Christ, and live in Ardmore. You can contact him at: dr.kerley@isGoddead.com.