I thought I was full. And by worldly standards, I was. By age 24, I had two degrees, had started my career, married my husband, and together, we were building our lives. I felt successful. Sure, there were ups and downs, but I handled it. I got through.

On my own. Sometimes I relied on my husband, but oftentimes, my independent streak fought even that. Nevermind God.

In my first blog post, I wrote a paragraph about how relying on your own strength and resources to get through life will eventually lead to emptiness and searching. I want to expand on that a bit.

The success I sought after in early adulthood was built on my own understanding of what would give me meaning and purpose. I was forging my own path with my own strength! How admirable!

Except, no.

My understanding of what would give me meaning and purpose was born from a mix of parental encouragement, public school pressure for a college and career focus, self-centered desires for personal achievement, and probably a true longing to help others.

Not that what I was working toward was bad necessarily, and neither were the people supporting me. It’s just that something was missing. I was set on a path of inevitable emptiness and searching.

There’s an interesting concept called the “God-shaped hole” that says we all have a yearning for our Creator, put in our hearts by Him, that many will try to fill with other things instead. Basically, it’s a square-peg-in-a-round-hole kind of situation. No matter what other thing you try filling your “God-shaped hole” with, it won’t exactly fit right; some of it may seep in and act as a soothing balm for a short while, but it won’t last and you’ll be left searching for the next thing.

This concept was written about by author Blaise Pascal, who wrote in his 1670 book, Pensées, “this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”

So you see, I was stuck in a cycle of searching for things to fill the emptiness. My hard work and worldly achievements, though few may have been pleasing to God in some way, I credited all to me. So when things got hard, or outcomes weren’t what I thought they’d be, that was also on me to solve, fix, and make better. No pressure or anything.

I filled my “God-shaped hole” with achievements, pleasing, praise, independence, hard work, and pride (among others I probably don’t even recognize).

The problem with everything I just listed is that they are temporary, shallow, easily lost, and utterly self-serving in the ways I operated my life.

And none of them worked.

I’m not saying that nothing in my life then made me happy or brought about goodness – of course it did. What I am saying is that none of what I tried to fill my heart with actually filled it, apart from God.

I’ve come to learn, through actively being in God’s Word, that we were created this way on purpose. Things of this world will die away and can never fill us, not completely. Only God can do that, if we’ll let him.

When I let Him in, He moved right in and started rearranging stuff. He threw some stuff out that I thought I needed, and replaced it with something better. He patched up parts of my heart that I had hardened in order to make it new. It wasn’t easy and I definitely resisted, but ultimately acquiesced. I had to surrender.

No longer empty and searching, I have never felt so full.

“…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Ephesians 3:17-19