A Door

(Found here)

“There’s a place where my greatest joy and the world’s greatest need meet, and that, Frederick Buechner would say, was your calling. And I think that’s a pretty good definition of a calling. How do you know when God is calling you? Well, I don’t know. In my own life I think that for years I tried to avoid loneliness, because it hurts to feel lonely. Now I’m beginning to recognize that maybe that’s what it feels like when God calls me. Maybe when God is calling, it hurts. Maybe when God calls us, it feels like a pain. And for years in my own life, I tried to drown that pain. I tried to avoid that pain. I tried to fill that ache with all kinds of what I can now look back on and see was a lot of stuff that was destroying me, corrupting me. And to listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness that we have in our own lives. And rather than always trying to drown out that feeling of emptiness, instead of always trying to fill it with a lot of junk, to allow that to be a door through which we go to meet God.

And this is where I think moral purity begins to play in, that almost everything that corrupts us is something we use to fill some kind of ache, some kind of emptiness. And moral purity might be nothing more than a call to accept the ache and to accept the emptiness, and to allow ourselves to go through that to where God is calling us to go. And the joy of the Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we’re going to encounter because we’re human, is ultimately met in Christ, and that everything that we try to fill it with that is not Christ will never really fill it.

…When we finally pull the lifeline we’ve created to the things we’ve tried to fill our emptiness with, when we say no, it is very scary. We think, will we ever stop hurting? My answer is don’t worry about hurting. Realize that this is how badly God wants you and that the hurt you’re feeling, that emptiness you’re feeling – maybe that’s the way it feels when you’re called by God so don’t try to fill or quiet it but ask God to give you the courage to face it and walk through it to him. Because when we connect with God, I don’t think that means that the emptiness goes away and is always gone. But, it frees us from those kind of IV needles that keep us bound up in some kind of hospital where we can’t really live freely and wander wildly as we want.

When we find God, we’re free. It is ‘for freedom that Christ has set us free.’ It is a wonderful thing to not be dependent on alcohol, to not be dependent on people, to not be dependent on sensationalism, and all those kinds of things. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to live in silence and to live in unpleasantness and to still have joy. Joy doesn’t come from substances or worldly wealth. Joy comes from God. We were created to love God and only when we experience that love are we really free. Anything that would impede that love or block our own awareness of our need for that, binds us up. That is why moral purity is an important thing. You want to set yourself free from those things that would impede you from freedom.”

~Rich Mullins (from a video interview)