The Power of One

As I noted in my last posting:  the one matters to God.

Steven Spielberg has explored this theme of the one in several of his films.  From E.T. to A.I. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Schindler's List to Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg seems almost obsessesed with the journey of the solitary individual.  In Saving Private Ryan we find the true story of how a troop of men literally marched through a world war to find and secure the safe return of one soldier.  This movie raises such important questions as:  What is the value of one human being?  and To what extreme should we go to save a single person?

Until I met my current pastor, Erik Braun, eleven years ago, I used to think that I was desperately searching for God during my latter teenage years.  Looking back, I now realize that God was desperately searching for me.  I used to wonder why my soul ached and God wouldn't do anything about it.  Now I perceive that it was that very pain that drove me to God.  A life lived without God starves the soul.  I thought for a while that God could meet my needs and stop the cravings of my soul.  Now I know that isn't really the case.  My soul doesn't crave something FROM God; my soul CRAVES God.  And by the way, so does yours.

That is why everything else leaves us unsatisfied in the end.  But we should not let this frustrate us; we should, instead, let it fuel us.  All the evidence we need to prove God is waiting to be discovered within us.  As we have traveled together for now twenty-eight postings over the past three months, I just want to say that our journey does not end here.  We are not at the final destination, but instead, at a crossroad.  There are decisions that we must consider, choices that perhaps we must make, steps that we must take.  Maybe we should stop and take a moment to turn our heads and look back.  We have journeyed farther than we may know.

If you are still tracking along with me then you are very much the kind of person that Jesus spoke very highly of in the gospels.  He calls people like you seekers [or perhaps you may already be one of His believers] and He assures you that if you seek, you will find.  He also promises that if you knock, the door will be opened to you, and if you ask, it will be given to you.  Please know, however, that He isn't so much speaking about material possessions here as much as He is about meeting the deepest longings of your soul.  So continue to seek, knock, ask and don't stop until you find, enter in and come to know the answer your soul has been searching for all along.

Our souls crave, and it's God that we are longing for.  So we should listen carefully to the conversations going on inside our heads.  We shouldn't worry ... we aren't really going crazy.  We are not talking to ourselves.  God is trying to get our attention and to bring us into relationship with Him.  If we will pay attention to our souls, they will guide us to God.

If God is real and we are created by Him, our souls already know this.  We may be in denial or even genuinely unaware of it, but if we would take the time to explore nowhere else except deep within ourselves, undoubtedly we would come face-to-face with God.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster asks the question, "Do you think there's life out there?"  The theme of the movie, of course, was that if there wasn't, then it would be a terrible waste of space.  I say that there is more unexplored space within us than there is in this ever-expanding universe.  If we will take the time to journey to the depths of our souls, we will not leave there disappointed, and perhaps to our surprise and astonishment, we will find God there.

Then what do we do?  If we find ourselves face-to-face with the God of the universe and feel His presence touch our souls like gentle breezes against our face, how will we respond to Him?  To trust in God, we have to truly know that He loves us without condition.  This is the beauty of Jesus' death on the cross.  It is literally God's celebration of His love for us.  His love embraces us wherever we happen to be in our journeys, and He refuses to leave us there.  Instead, He launches us on a quest to pursue the lives we were created to live.  Our souls know that there is a greater purpose for our lives, a God-sized dream waiting to unfold and become our futures.

We are all on a quest for intimacy, for meaning, for our destinies.  Our souls crave love and faith and hope.  We are all searching for what it is that our souls long for, and we will be satisfied only in God.  My guess is that it will never be easy, but at least Jesus has made it possible.  We don't have to be afraid to commit our lives to someone who gives His life for us.

Maybe you are different than I am, but my guess is that we are probably a lot alike in this.  Your soul, too, craves to believe.  You may have been burned, you may have even been deceived, but deep in your gut, somewhere deep inside, there is a voice telling you that God can be trusted with your life, that you can trust someone like Jesus.  His love is pure and your soul thirsts for Him like water is needed by a crusted desert.  That there is more to life than you can know without God.  Jesus walked among us so that we could get close enough to hear Him, to see Him, to touch Him, to know Him.  To know Him, this is what our souls crave.