I hope you have had at least one moment you can recall easily from your life where you knew God loves you. That moment of total love that feels so good and filled you up completely. Hold that moment in your mind now. If you haven’t, can you imagine somebody you love so much? Maybe it’s a spouse or your child or someone else who means the world to you. Now try to imagine multiplying that love by an infinite amount. That is how God feels about you. Can you image always being in His presence like that? Can you imagine just basking in that love and the feelings of acceptance and peace? In God’s presence we lack nothing. We have everything we need. That is what it must have been like for Adam and Eve, but so much more than we can comprehend or fully imagine in this mortal state.
So for Adam and Eve to have to leave that, can you see the big, gaping hole it would have left inside of them? Can you see the void it would leave to suddenly not have that any more? Remember how we have talked about conception is the vehicle to pass on the terms of mortality physically and spiritually? The physical part means we come into this earth-life as mortals. The spiritual part is not only that we inherit the natures, the seeds, that grow into the carnal, sensual, and devilish, but also it means we come into a world cast out of God’s presence. There may be moments when we feel God’s presence. But even in our very best and most righteous moments, it just does not compare to what it was like before we came to this earth and we were with Him.
Just like Adam and Eve had a void after being cast out, we do too. We come into this world knowing innately that we are missing something. We are seeking desperately to find those things that remind us of “home.” We seek for things to fill us because we have a huge hole! This is the part I didn’t know before my life fell to shambles. My dear friend, Jaci, taught me this and when I heard it as she explained it like this, it just clicked. The crazy part is that the reason we turn to our favorite fallen man tendencies or our own personal versions of carnal, sensual, and devilish is because they actually do fill us. You read that right. They do fill us. They make us feel better. They stuff up that void and we may actually even feel better about ourselves, too. That is why we turn to them---because they work. They accomplish what we are looking for. The problem, though, is that the “fix” is only a temporary one and very often with undesirable or detrimental long-term consequences.
The Savior said, “For my people have committed two evils; 1. they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and 2. hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, emphasis added). When we turn to things instead of Christ, we are doing just as He described there. We are turning away from the One Source that could fill us so that we don’t thirst any more. (See John 4 where Christ refers to himself as living water in his conversation with the woman at the well.) When we feel these pangs, these reminders that we are out of God’s presence, rather than turning to things, we can learn to turn to Christ. It is Christ who can fill us in a way that will last. He says the second evil is that we have tried to make our own jugs to carry the water in, but these jugs we have patch-job put together have holes and cracks in them. They can’t even hold the water adequately! We have done our best to just muscle past it and try to fix it ourselves. Again, as we try to draw water any other way, it will not be adequate to fill up this void.
Jaci says it in the way only Jaci can, “I met [a woman] a few weeks ago while speaking to a group of Young Women and leaders about body image. In the middle of our discussion, she brought up her struggle with emotional eating (an obsession I've experienced myself). She said she knew very well why she did it—because food had this way of soothing and pacifying her negative emotions. It gave her a little rush of happiness, a moment of bliss, an escape from the stress of the daily grind or the realities of whatever difficult situation she may be in.
“I believe that’s actually the motivation behind most (if not all) of our secret obsessions. No matter what form they may take (be it a credit card, a personal hobby, or a place we like to hang out online), the results are still the same: they really do give us that little rush of happiness, that moment of bliss, that escape for a minute from whatever difficult thing we're experiencing. These are our coping mechanisms. The happy place we run to when we’re feeling low.
“But even though we may understand that idea in theory, we may have never considered that what we're really doing is using these things to feed our restless heart. That we’re trying to satisfy a soul hunger that we may not have even put into words. That we’re trying to fill an emptiness that we may not even realize we’re feeling.
“It would certainly explain why that particular thing has become such an obsession in our lives. If it’s actually been feeding our heart’s deepest needs and longings, then of course we’re going to turn to it over and over and over again. That thing may be validating us when we’re feeling inadequate or insecure. Or it may allow us to live in a fantasy world that helps us forget about our failing relationship or that difficult child or an overly stressful job. If that’s the case, the truth is that behavior modification is never going to be enough to overcome it.”
Now catch what Jaci says next, “Imagine what happens when we try to remove that thing from our lives without replacing it with something that truly fills our need. Won’t the resulting emptiness eventually drive us right back to our special little something? Making ourselves stop our habit out of sheer willpower doesn’t even come close to addressing the real problem. The real problem is that inner need (whatever it is) that keeps driving us to find relief from our obsession. If we'll pinpoint that need, we’ll finally be on our way to true and lasting healing. For once we understand what our heart is truly longing for, we can take those pressing needs to the One who really, truly can satisfy us (Psalm 36:8). And once our hearts are filled with His grace and His glory and His love, that little obsession will suddenly feel like small potatoes in comparison to the exquisite taste of the fruit of the Tree of Life.
“So maybe the next time we feel a need to invent some strategy to help us overcome a personal obsession, perhaps we could focus instead on the true ‘bread of life,’ a nourishment that promises us that we’ll ‘never hunger’ and ‘never thirst’ ever again (John 6:35). It’s the only thing that can fill us in a way that is’“everlasting’ (John 6:47). Once our heart is truly that satisfied and content, our secret little obsession will simply no longer hold the same appeal and will drop right out of our lives. And we'll wonder why we ever even tried behavior modification.
“‘Yea, he saith: Come unto me and ye shall partake of the fruit of the tree of life; yea, ye shall eat and drink of the bread and the waters of life freely’” (Alma 5:34). (COme back and cite, emphasis added).
You have the choice before you to continue forward in this journey. You can continue to turn to the same old things or maybe the newly developing things or you can be willing to try something that is most likely completely different. We will fill in more of the details as we continue forward. For now, it’s time to look closely at the details of your own life once again.
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