The Ache and the Foretaste

[intro]You’re just wrapping up your undergraduate experience at MSU, you’ve landed your dream job, you’re in a great relationship with the person of your dreams, you have a strong relationship with Jesus, and yet you still feel like something’s off.

Life is fulfilling and you still feel an ache, a gap. You begin to feel some concern for your mental health. How can everything be going so well and yet something doesn’t seem right?[/intro]

When you read Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament you see the most successful person in the history of the world wrestling with the exact same thing. Solomon, held by many as the writer of Ecclesiastes, had everything. And yet his conclusion was, “All is vanity and a striving after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11, 17, 23, 26). Solomon had wealth, women, power, wisdom–he had it all–and yet he said it was all vanity.

So why do we feel like something’s missing, even when we have so much? I have two proposals for what might be going on inside of us.

A Lack of Excitement

First, I think a large part of our issue is that we think life is supposed to be mostly excitement and adventure, when in reality most of life is mundane.

Go back twenty years ago and you had people whose basic assumption about life was that it was pretty uneventful. Life was life. Work was work. Life still had meaning and purpose, but there was no FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). You didn’t know what you were missing out on because there wasn’t social media to show you how much fun you weren’t having.

Fast forward to today, and work is still work and life is still pretty much uneventful. The big difference is that now you have something to compare your life with–all the lives of the people you follow on Instagram. All of their lives seem way more fun and exciting than what you’re experiencing. And all you’re left with are emotions that communicate that your life is lame and you’re missing out.

A Lack of Fulfillment

Second, we have somehow been convinced that this world is supposed to satisfy our deep longing for happiness and fulfillment. We have an expectation, and that expectation isn’t realistic.

You and I were designed to live in a garden with God; to walk with God; to live in the very presence of God. Everything after Genesis 3 falls way short of what God designed you to know and experience. Add to this pain and suffering and you have a recipe for major discouragement and discontentment. And so, this reality helps us to understand that an ache is normal. Everyone feels it. Solomon had everything, and still had an ache. You can try and do everything you can to numb the ache, but it doesn’t go away.

Finding Meaning In Spite of the Ache

So what do we do? At the end of the day, Solomon said this:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13

First, we need to see that Solomon saw walking with God as the key to life. Jesus came to us to show us what it meant to know God, to abide with God and walk with Him.

Second, the thrust of the New Testament isn’t focused on this world meeting your greatest longings. The secret of the early church was their focus on being in the presence of God. Jesus taught his disciples that God was preparing a place for them. Another life was coming when they would live in the very presence of God. And it was that life that held the promise to fulfill the greatest longings of our souls.

The Apostle Paul emphasized this in his letter to the church in Philippi. He said this:

For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain…My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. – Phil. 1:21,23

I don’t know if anyone has ever told this to you before, but it’s OK to ache. It’s actually normal to feel an ache even when life is going well, when you experience success and even relational fulfillment with Christ and others.

Your ache won’t be totally subdued until you live in the literal presence of God. That’s what you were designed for. That’s where your hope is at. Everything in this life is a foretaste of what you will have one day. Marriage and sex is a foretaste. Good wine and good food is a foretaste. Good relationships are a foretaste. And a foretaste is just a sampling of what one day will be reality.

Image Credit: Eric Ward