The Ache That Was Put There on Purpose

I had an evening last summer when the light hit the mountains just right, my kids were laughing about something I can't even remember now, and I had this sudden, almost physical urge to keep it. Not just enjoy it — keep it. Freeze the frame. And underneath that urge was a strange little grief, because I already knew I couldn't.

That feeling has a name, and Ecclesiastes 3 names it better than anything else I've read. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end (3:11). I used to read that verse the way most people do — off a coffee mug, as a promise that everything works out eventually, so just hang in there. That's not what it's saying. Read it in context and it's closer to a complaint. The author is telling you that God put something in you that nothing under the sun can satisfy, and then declined to tell you how the story ends.

That's the ache. You felt it the day you finally got the thing you'd chased for ten years, and three weeks later it hadn't made you whole. You felt it at a funeral when the music stopped and you walked out into an ordinary afternoon that didn't seem to know the world had just changed. You were built for something that doesn't end, and you live in a world made entirely of things that do.

David Foster Wallace had, by every external measure, the writing career most novelists dream of — the acclaimed novel, the most-quoted commencement speech of his generation, the genius grant, the readers and the friends. Two years before he ended his own life in 2008, he stood at a podium and told graduates, "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship... if you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough." He was right about the diagnosis. He just couldn't find the cure. Augustine found it centuries earlier and said it in one line: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

The speaker in Ecclesiastes says something almost shocking right after naming it: I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live (3:12). He cannot trace God's plan from beginning to end. He cannot make the longing go away.

You don't fill the eternity in your heart by finding yourself. There's nothing in there big enough. You receive it from Someone Else. One day the ache gets answered for good. He will wipe every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). You were made for that. Until then, you were not made to fix the ache. The eternity in your heart was not a design flaw. You were made to bring it to him.