we read that God “blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew word for spirit, ruah, means numerous things, including spirit. God gifted humanity with his life-giving Spirit, animating us and offering us a communion of life with the one who made us. For this reason nothing else in creation bears God’s image and likeness like you and me. Of all the things that exist in the world, nothing matches the dignity of the human person fashioned in God’s image. And if we are made in God’s image, then we must understand that we were fashioned to love and to be in relationship.
We know through God’s supernatural revelation of himself that God is a Trinity—three persons in one being. God’s being is so immense that it cannot be contained in one person. Therefore, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal relationship. The Father loves the Son and offers everything to him—including the depths of his own being. The Son, out of love and fidelity to the Father, offers everything back to him—even his own life. In this mutual self-giving, this Divine Exchange (which has always happened and will always happen), the Holy Spirit is eternally present—the very love between the Father and the Son personified. This is perhaps the deepest mystery of our faith, yet we can speak confidently and say that God is a communion of persons in eternal relationship.
This is why at the heart of who we are is a hunger—a hunger to love and to be loved, to know and to be known. This hunger is a holy one, placed there by God. If you and I are truly made in his image, then it is true to say that we were made to be in relationship, in communion, with God and with one another. It is in our nature because it is God’s nature.
Fulfilled Through Love
The truth is that our hearts were made for the infinite love of God. God has shaped our deepest desires for eternal things. Nothing here on earth can truly satisfy us at the deepest level. When we don’t know this, when even this very first part of the Great Story remains hidden from us, we stumble through life searching in every direction to satisfy this hunger which drives us on. Sometimes we try to fill ourselves up on good things—family, dignified work, serving others. Sometimes we try to fill ourselves up on things that are not so good for us—the pursuit of money, power, sex, alcohol, drugs, or fame. The reality is that whatever we try to do in order to satisfy this hunger, we will always remain fundamentally dissatisfied and “hungry” unless we come to know the One who placed these desires within us.
I recall a time in my life when I was working in the corporate world. I had labored very hard over a number of years to become a vice-president in my company. This desire captured my thoughts and imagination for a long time. It shaped the conversations I had and, in some cases, the relationships I made and maintained. Through hard work and dedication (and, honestly, some luck), I achieved that desire. The very thing that I had worked for over the course of years came through. Naturally, I was ecstatic when this happened. I remember having about three weeks of real satisfaction before I started to feel just the tiniest bit of uneasiness. This uneasiness grew quickly, and it wasn’t that long before I was asking myself the questions: Is this it? What’s next? Soon, I found myself unsettled and fixating on becoming a senior vice-president.
The point of this little remembrance isn’t that striving for things is bad, or somehow ungodly. Rather, the point is I was not satisfied, even after achieving a major milestone in my life. Soon, I was driven to find something else to fill the hunger that emerged. The reality is that only one thing can truly satisfy the human heart: knowing and loving the One who created it. That’s why St. Augustine, a disciple of Christ and bishop of the fourth and fifth centuries, famously wrote: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”
Think back on your own life, on the times when you’ve been restless, dissatisfied, hungry for something deeper than the things in your life were able to give you. Perhaps you are experiencing that hunger now. Or perhaps you feel like everything in life is good right now, and there is only an occasional twinge or stab of hunger, when night has settled and the moon has almost completed its course, and the house is silent and heavy with a promise of sleep that never seems to come.
You were made for the One who created you.
That’s the beginning of the Great Story. Your life has a purpose, a shape, and a destiny that ends and begins with the love of the Creator who intentionally brought you into existence in this time and this place. He wants so much for you to be in communion with him that he built the possibility of that intimacy within your very being. We hear of God’s desire to be in relationship with us in the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah. The Lord is speaking to the young Jeremiah, and God affirms his love for him and his desire for Jeremiah to serve him: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (1:5).
What the Lord says to Jeremiah is true for each and every one of us. We may be tempted to gloss over the stunning revelation that God has offered us. “Big deal,” we might say. “So what if God knows us? He’s God and knows everything.” The problem is that we lack an appreciation for the biblical concept of knowledge. We are not talking about surface knowledge—the knowledge that we might have of an acquaintance or neighbor. In fact, we are not even talking about the knowledge we might have of a close friend. The biblical word translated as “knowledge” from the Greek indicates heart knowledge: in-depth, intimate connection. That’s why biblical writers sometimes used it as a euphemism, or “stand-in,” for relations between husband and wife—the marital act. As an example, in the Gospel of Luke the angel Gabriel has just appeared to Mary and declared that she will bear a son, and this boy will be the messiah, the long-awaited savior. In some translations of the Bible, she replies, “How can this be, since I do not know a man” (1:34, emphasis added).
Here is the depth of God’s love for us. He knows us deeply, intimately, and he knew us before we were “formed in the womb”—in other words, before we were even conceived. Before we existed the Lord held us in his heart, knowing everything about us. And while this image is somewhat metaphorical, the radical truth is that the Father waited through the long stretch of eternity for your conception, and for mine. The Father must have danced with joy and delight when we came into being, for at last we could experience the love he held for us. Now at last we could respond and live out that encounter.
From that moment, the Father’s arms have been open wide. He knows your name and who you are, and he has been calling you to a relationship that will ignite the deepest parts of who you are and fill you with peace, fulfillment, joy, wholeness, and a perfect love beyond all imagining. The power of this story lies, in part, in its immediacy. This life-changing relationship is not just a promise for a time when our earthly life is over. No, the Lord wants us to experience this peace, joy, fulfillment, wholeness, and healing now, in this life.
The Bible is filled with the proclamation of the possibility of this relationship. The books of the Bible, especially the New Testament, have a language and a description for the experience of this relationship. In Scripture, it is called the kingdom of God. You and I were created for this kingdom. It has been prepared for you and is waiting for you—this kingdom which begins on earth and lasts for all eternity.
It is your birthright.
Are you willing to follow the arc of the story and claim it?
Further Reflection
Take some time (at least fifteen minutes a day) to reflect on any of the following Scriptures over the course of the next few days and weeks. If you have never really opened the Bible and spent time prayerfully reading, don’t stress about it. Simply copy and paste these references into your search engine, print them out, and read them.
• Jeremiah 29:11–15
• Matthew 11:28–30
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