My uni days were spent half-times in tutes, half-times in empty classrooms; sometimes bathrooms.
I’d often sneak out after class to find a quiet little spot where I could hit the floor and pray.
It wasn’t that I was super spiritual — I was just super hungry.
Since losing my Dad at a young age, I’d often feel the void within which propelled me to seek and search.
With that gaping wound, I needed answers to life’s deepest questions.
And what stirred deep within was a longing for a Father’s love where I could be found, and held.
The questions surrounding life and mortality and what our reason for existence could be would swirl around my heart and I needed to know:
“Is there really life after death?”
“Is there really a God who cares in the face of our pain and suffering?”
So I’d often pray — “God… if You really are here, then I need You right now.”
And His love would flow and His peace would come.
Every moment felt like a homecoming.
Perhaps after experiencing any sort of pain or relational disappointment or life‘s devastation; the heart always searches for an answer, for a purpose behind the pain. And I’d never forget what Chuck Colson penned when he experienced first-hand an encounter with Christ…
Colson who was an ex-Marine captain and President Nixon’s White House hatchet man gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, yet in all the gripping parts of his story, he said:
“I guess I’m looking for something…I’m trying to find out what’s real and what isn’t – who we are – who I am in relation to God” — the kind of search we’re all looking for.
When he finally encountered Christ fully in 1973, he wrote:
“And so early that Friday morning, while I sat alone staring at the sea I love, words I had not been certain I could understand or say fell naturally from my lips: “Lord Jesus Christ, I believe You. I accept You. Please come into my life. I commit it to You.”
With these few words that morning, while the briny sea churned, came a a sureness of mind that matched the depth of feeling in my heart.
There came something more: strength and serenity, a wonderful assurance about life, a fresh perception of myself and the world around me…
I was coming alive to things I’d never seen before; as if God was filling the barren void I’d known for so many months.” (Charles Colson, “Born Again”, 1976.)
His life was so revolutionised that he later went on to form Prison Fellowship, a ministry that has helped many found behind bars.
And in many ways, it is the same stirring.
And it is the same search.
It is the same pull towards that insatiable hunger to know the truth.
And if it’s true; if there can be serenity in all our confusion — then our deepest hunger could surely be met with Heaven’s greatest, most sacrificial love.