Have you seen a good movie lately? When was the last time you have allowed yourself to be swept away in a thickening plot of protagonistic victory? I love a good movie. They are hard to resist. After all, through a movie you can sit down and enjoy the rush of emotion and psychological barrel rolls, then tie up the loose ends all within two hours. That is what makes a movie so worthwhile. For just a few hours we can remove ourselves from the doldrums of everyday living. For a small window of time we are able to escape the shame of an earlier choice, the continual fighting of children underfoot, the disappointment of unfulfilled expectations, the angst of an unsatisfied soul. At least for those few hours we can be the hero. We can put on the other person’s shoes and live the high life for a while. If not but in our own imagination, we can know how it all will end. That seems to be the streaming call to modern humanity; the desire for a life that makes sense. It is something the human soul longs to grasp but finds increasingly allusive – the need for direction, clarity, resolution.

Do you remember Scout? She’s the darling little ankle-biter we find rummaging through the adult perspective on life in the movie adaptation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel “To Kill A Mockingbird”. She has just enough how-can-I-be-mad-at-you freckles sprinkled across her countenance that you pass over her innocent indiscretions and wandering musings. She has an unmatched tenacity of pressing the envelope to the limits but never enough that it snaps back to sting her in the buttocks. What a life.

There is a scene in the movie where Scout is sitting at the dinner table with her brother Walter and her father Atticus, whom she regularly addressed by first name. A luxury I certainly did not enjoy growing up. Walter, enthralled with his meal dives in unhindered by any sense of manners or cognizance of others at the table. And Scout offers her opinion on Walter’s way of enjoying his dinner. “What in the sam hill are you doin’ Walter?”, she exclaims. Atticus interrupts her to calm her emotion only to get this snapped response from Scout, “But Atticus, he’s gone and drowned dinner in syrup and now’s he gotten it all over.” Syrup is a lot like life – messy, sticky and a real pain to clean up.

It is worth taking the time to know more about Scout.  More directly, what Scout represents – the idealic life of days gone by. Remember when you ran home from school for milk, cookies and late afternoon adventures on the Huffy?  I do. I am not that old and I remember with fondness a life that has slipped passed me while I wasn’t looking. Now life throws all sorts of curve balls. The neck break speed is overwhelming. But we must keep up, or face the insult of coming in second place. If it isn’t the demands of our families, it’s the increasing hours we must put in at the office or in ministry or whatever else that fills our time. These demands are draining us of quiet and relaxation, leaving in the wake anger and frustration. For most of us we direct our angst toward a person rather than a situation. It is the need in us to identify the reality of our frustration with a human being. The cause of these feelings do not become tangible unless we ascribe them to the antagonist that strives against what we feel we deserve in this life. After all how can we blame a situation or circumstance; what relief does that bring? Where do we direct our anger when we feel our lives have been drowned in syrup and now it has gotten all over?

Many years ago I took the time to take some personal inventory.  What I found was not very attractive.  I looked at my life and I saw a beautiful wife, a wonderful home, enjoyable and intriguing relationships all around me. Yet I felt unsatisfied. And it had less to do with superfluous syrup splatters and more to do with the recognition of an unsatisfied soul. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. I was a pastor and a missionary. I should have been, at all times, overflowing with the abounding love and peace of Jesus. I was not. Instead, my mind routinely gave way to the “what if?” and the “why?” The ongoing nagging in the back of my brain was the “want for a better way” of doing life.

The human soul is compulsive. Everything we do in modern society is based on our wants. We attempt to satisfy every desire to get what we don’t have. This compulsive behavior is the basis of modern mass marketing, and it works. Be honest. How much do we own that we really only have because of our compulsive nature? It is why we experience guilt for making a purchase we know we shouldn’t have made in the first place. This buyer’s remorse is nothing more than our conscience vying for space in a crowded soul.

Henri Nouwen has greatly helped me in understanding this area. In his small book, The Way of the Heart he explains that our world is simply too wordy. In every place we look we see words screaming at us looking for attention. “Buy me”, “rent me”, “you deserve me”, “have sex with me.” There are so many words that say nothing at all that the intrinsic value of the word itself is sacrificed for compulsive gratification. So much so we can hardly believe any word anymore. “Words, words, words!”, Nouwen exclaims, “In such a world, who can maintain respect for words? … [words] have lost their creative power. Their limitless multiplication has made us lose confidence in words and caused us to think, more often than not, ‘They are just words.’ ”

Take a drive sometime and look around you at all the words that don’t say anything of any value.  It is ridiculous. Did our parents really think it would be cute if their children wanted to grow up to be Oscar Meier wieners?  But we just move along in our minivans and sport utility vehicles like it is normal.  It is not normal. Silly phrases that try to soften a harsh world, in the end are only silly phrases.  And they cheapen the innate power of a thoughtful word. This is the danger of living a life of status-quo in a world that is anything but status-quo. After too much time entrenched in this pseudo-safety zone, our minds mistake novelty for the profound and our madness becomes commonplace.  

Nouwen records the Egyptian monk St. Anthony’s words on this point, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’ “.  St. Anthony was on to something. The human mind, when allowed to wander into the minefield of the obscure, is only doing so at the permission of the soul.

There was obviously something wrong with me, my wife had been hitting on it for months and she needed some answers as to why I had lost my joy. It came to a head. After a gruff phone conversation with her earlier in the evening, we knew as soon as I was home we would need to resolve our issues before turning off the lights. Like most men, I once had a terribly difficult time dealing with matters of the heart. Those things that are most personal. Not the issues of the “us”, but the issues that pertain to the “me”. (Of course, the “me” stuff, by nature, is the “us” by default. That is why Scripture tells us to leave and cleave to our spouse. Refusing to do so only strengthens the argument that is the selfishness and corruption of the human soul.) Let me try to provide some context.

I was insecure. I was 30 years old when I married. For the previous ten years I had studied, read, and listened to anything I could get my hands on regarding how I was to treat my wife. What were the primary needs of a woman compared to a man? As a man, what did I need? How do I generally handle the “emotional” female perspective? What about conflict? How do we resolve conflict effectively and maintain a healthy relationship? How do I lead as a husband and father? These are the questions to which I sought answers. And, frankly, I found answers to pretty much all of them. And when I finally met my wife I was “ready” to fall in love and live happily ever after. She met all the mental criteria I had been asking the Lord for the previous decade. She had a strong personality. She was confident. She was smart and able to debate issues from alternative points of view. I found all of this intriguing. By the time we married we had worked through major issues in our relationship. We had weathered the storm, and were looking forward to smoother waters. Our problem was that the issues were one-sided – hers. I still had lingering subconscious insecurities in the recesses of my soul, and it was beginning to deeply affect our marriage.

My life was one of meeting expectations. Whether perceived or actual, I was determined never to let anyone down who I considered close. I was a consummate people pleaser. For those that I really didn’t know, they didn’t concern me. They didn’t affect my life day to day. But, for the people that I considered close, if I even sensed a hint of disappointment I would be sent into a tail spin. How is that for leadership in a relationship with a sharply opinionated wife?  Do you see the coming train wreck?

So, while mulling over our disagreement, I needed to decide whether or not I was going to trust my wife with the ugly recesses of my conundrum. I made a monumental choice that night. I decided to lay myself bare. “My life has always been one of condition and I am afraid that what you feel for me will change if I don’t’ meet the “conditions” of our relationship.” The confession turned on the light. The fact that I had hidden these feelings was doing the very thing that I was hoping to avoid. I was eroding her confidence in me by not communicating beyond the academic. As that confidence eroded, how she related to me changed. She became more distant, independent. How could she not, I was keeping her at arm’s distance. It affected everything. And although she had been telling me for months that things were growing worse, I denied it.  Our heart connection that night allowed us to turn the corner. It was wonderfully painful. I have often told people who have attended my classes that it isn’t God’s ability with which we have trouble, it is his reliability. We know God can move the mountain if we ask, but will he? I discovered what I had already known, that all the years of not confronting my own soul had left me picking up the pieces from a fragmented, unsatisfied life.

This is a dangerous place to be, specifically if you are like me and find yourself in a place of ministry.   The problems I was having in my relationship with my wife were not merely a response to our physical life together. They are responses in relationship to the health of my soul. I suffered from an unsatisfied soul. I was unsatisfied in my relationship with my wife, for reasons I just shared. I was unsatisfied with my relationship with Jesus. I was unsatisfied with my work. I was unsatisfied with my “performance” as a husband. I was unsatisfied.

Why?

I had been a reluctant friend of this world. What did it gain me but angst and frustration?  In John 10:10 we are instructed that “…the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy…” My so-called friend is a thief; a thief with whom I freely exchanged ideas and future plans. Meanwhile, my soul suffered. And God, the one I loved most of all was unknowingly categorized to something less than my King. I had unwittingly exchanged a life of abundance and grace with one of ‘wanted abundance’ in the eyes of others.  My fear of disapproval, that I thought I had broken years earlier, had reared it’s ugly head and I had given it a place of honor it did not deserve.

The luring nature is to convince us that it is okay to put down our sword and shield. “This place is relatively safe and I can rest now. I can take a moment and breathe.” As if the fight is ours to wage in the first place. That is the subtlety of the fight. We first convince ourselves that it is our fight.  Once we are convinced, we are then, by some long winding road, drawn to a place where we think either we can lower our guard or we are so tired we must.  Either way, we have lost the fight.  Something must change.

The fight is a fight for the soul.  As long as we seek fulfillment from a thief, we will forever be unfulfilled, unsatisfied and chasing after what he (the devil) has stolen. Satisfaction is found in relationship and wholeness.  And Jesus is the only person that owns the salve that can heal the corruption. This salve stings and bites and draws out the poisonous lies, ridicule, greed, and ambition that plague us at the very core of whom we no longer want to be. This salve, we will need to let do it’s work over time. The wounds that that have taken years to carve out must be cleaned. We must allow every nook and cranny of wickedness to be dried out.

It will take time.

It will be painful.

But there in those most difficult of decisions resides the grace and mercy and love of God.  And that is what we must cling to.

Thomas Merton writes about this type of relationship the desert fathers incorporated, in his book, “Wisdom of the Desert”:

“Society … was regarded as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life … These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they know as society, was purely and simply a disaster … They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.”

Choose to endure the pain and hostility and confusion attributed to warfare, for it is warfare into which we place ourselves when we choose to follow God.  Choose to abide in the truth of the person of Jesus Christ.  Choose to allow God to reform your soul into his likeness.  No longer choose the accolades of humanity, instead choose the stillness of relationship with God.  It is here you will find that for which you seek. It is here you will find a satisfied soul.