I find myself often talking about how unfulfilled I feel
with my job. I don’t feel as though I am
serving a purpose. I am just a cog spinning
into oblivion with no real meaning. I
also hear others talking about how unfulfilled they feel with their jobs, or
their friendships, or their relationships with their significant other, or
their families, or just with life in general.
I realized something last night while talking with my wife
over dinner. We were eating chicken and
waffles at Café 4. It was
delicious. Anyhow, we were talking about
how unfulfilled we feel in our career paths.
I listened to her talk about how she had worked so hard through college
to become a teacher and yet she is still not fulfilled. I mean she is absolutely made for her
job! She is intelligent, great with kids,
kind, and she loves teaching (I don’t want to confuse this with fulfilling,
though), and, yet no fulfillment! I, on
the other hand, took quite the opposite approach. I didn’t work that hard in college and I still
feel unfulfilled. I’m not really sure if
I even fit the job description, unlike my wife, so if the scenarios are
flipped, shouldn’t the feeling be different?
Even in friendships.
I don’t struggle with this that much, but I am not 100% satisfied or
fulfilled with the friendships and relationships I have built. I am certainly not fulfilled by family. I long for more in my life, so, I guess, life
isn’t that fulfilling? After all these
thoughts were through processing, in the midst of our conversation, I had a
realization.
There’s no fulfillment apart from Jesus.
There is this foundation wall underneath my house that is
cracked from end to end. It’s an old
house, built in 1930, and apparently this wall is not the first one that has cracked. From what I understand, there was another
wall in front of it that had done the same thing as result of years of rain pushing
dirt up against it. Instead of just
fixing the problem, they just built another wall, hoping it would stand longer. The reason that these walls continue to
buckle is because there is no foundation poured underneath them! They just laid the cinderblocks down on the
basement floor and started building.
Eventually, we will have to fix this problem correctly before the whole
house comes down.
Without Jesus there is no foundation. Without a foundation, nothing that is built
will stand on its own for forever. Without Jesus in any of those things that we
look for fulfillment in, we will most undoubtedly not find it. That is why we hit the ground running so hard
on most the things we do in our lives, jobs, relationships, life, etc. and a
short time later we feel unsatisfied, sad, tired, angry, desperate…unfulfilled. We weren’t meant to live this life apart from
God.
When we are finally able to see things from a much a
grander, merely divine, perspective we see that it isn’t about serving a
purpose, but about serving Jesus.
Serving Him through how we serve others in our jobs, marriages,
friendships, families…our lives. Fulfilled
because we are a blessed cog serving a divine purpose.
Lord,
Help me to believe this for myself.
Amen.
