The God-Shaped Vacuum -- Part 2

Dear TEAMS,

In the Fall of 2011, I was a keynote speaker at our church’s Ladies’ Retreat.  I spoke about the God-Shaped hole, and how that related to addiction, and brought in my personal experience with food addiction.  This and the following posts are this same talk with minimal modifications. 

A attended the retreat and said it’s what she’s heard her whole life.  May you find this information as familiar.  And may you decide every day to allow Father to fill you when you are empty, instead of with all the earthly stuff you rely on.  Because you all have addictions as well.

Click here to read the first part of this talk.

Love, 

We have been sharing a lot about stories this weekend, and what I would like to do is share with you as my sisters some of my story, and a key concept I learned that radically changed my life and has practically made my life easier.  In fact, my understanding this concept has become key to my physical, mental, social, and emotional health.  Could I please see the hands of the women in this room who would like to be healthy physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally.  Great!  Then we are all on the same page.  And if you didn’t raise your hand, thanks for being honest.  I hope you will still stay with me to see what I have learned for later in life when you are at a place you’d like to get there.

I am the product of many circumstances growing up.  My parents married in 1955 and my father was going to seminary to study to be a pastor and my mother was preparing to be a pastor’s wife the way most women in that time period were in conventional churches.  Her wedding gifts included linens for entertaining, those little glass plates with a circle in them for cookie and punch receptions, and good silver.  But after the first year of marriage, my father began to make choices that took him away from the relationship he had with the Lord, and my mother began to make choices because of my father’s choices that took her further away as well.  When I came along as the last of 4 surviving children 12 years into their marriage, my father was not honoring his marriage covenant and my mother was caught in a web that included self-pity, anger, and bitterness.  I would like to stop here and be sure to honor my parents, because as shocking and sad as these facts are, I will say that they earnestly tried to do the best with what they had.  All of us kids always had food on the table, and it does appear that my parents understood that life was bigger than them at that point.  This fact is not lost on me, and I want to publicly compliment even though they are not here for the sacrifices they made for our wellbeing, based on what they felt was best at the time.

I entered adult life after a childhood that involved my parents divorcing, the embarrassment of my father’s indiscretions, molestation by a relative, and being raised by a feminist mother.   But God is the Hound of Heaven, isn’t He?  Because included in that childhood was hearing about Jesus Christ and the need to accept Him into my heart, and also having many people in the church I was attending take me under their wing to show me how to read the Bible, and how to be sure that I related to God as my friend as well as my Savior. 

After college, I worked for a year and got married to Darryl, and of course, we had our children.  Darryl and I have had our hard times as well, as we have been through counseling on three different occasions, and I have had two different depressive episodes, plus all of the challenges that come from having children.

The thing is, with all of life’s ups and downs, I kept trying to be a good Christian, follow the Bible, worship God.  However, I kept having desperate times where I asked questions such as: 

• Why am I even here?
• Isn’t there more to life than this?
• I thought I was made for greater things
• If I do all of the right things, why do I still feel empty?
• If I’m a mature Christian, why do I have ups and downs?
• How do I keep all of these plates spinning without letting them fall?

And I still wrestled with these bouts of feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin, or feeling anxious, or just having no motivation to do anything, because I didn’t see the purpose of working so hard or striving so hard.  Has anyone ever felt these things?  Or better, who is willing to admit they have felt this way?