The Hole Not Even Jesus Can Fill - The Single Girl Diaries

Well, if ever there was a controversial title to a blog post, this just might be it. It is not really meant to be controversial {:okay, maybe a little-sometimes I can't help myself:}, but it is more or less an ode to that thing we always get, as the single girlat the dinner table: "Jesus is enough to fill that empty void in your heart."

To that I say yes...and no.

If you are single, a Christian, and over the age of 27, I can almost guarantee you have been told something like this. It is the Christian verbal "band-aid" for singleness. I touched on it a little in my last post. It's the "God" answer when people don't know what else to say.

Is it true? Is Jesus enough? Yes.

Yes, He is the source of everything we need. Yes, He is enough to satisfy our longing heart. Yes, He is bigger than our lonely nights spent with Ben and Jerry. Yes, He is able to give us what we need. Yes, to all of that stuff that we know in our well saturated, church attending, small group sitting minds.

But what about when it isn't true?

In perfect theory, Jesus is enough. But that's just the thing. We are not perfect, and life is not a class in theory. What happens when what we are experiencing - our longing - doesn't line up with the theory we have been taught and pledged to believe?

We are human beings, living in a fallen world. So, in theory Jesus is enough, but in our human-ness, in our realities, in our singleness, sometimes He just isn't enough.

Is God mad about that? I don't think so. He knows us. He knows how he created us. He knows our limits. He knows our struggles. He knows our desires...because He put them there. Rather than fighting with us and fitting himself into a hole we long to have filled in a natural way, I believe He leverages what we have the ability to offer him.

As I started this post, God dropped Hannah in my heart. Hannah {:in 1 Sam. 1:} is clearly a woman of God. She loved God with all her heart. Yet she, like me and maybe like you, had a hole of longing within her heart. A hole that not even the immense love she had for her God could fill. See, Hannah was barren, and was crying out from a place of longing - longing to be a mother.

[Hannah] pulled herself together, slipped away quietly, and entered the sanctuary... Crushed in soul, Hannah prayed to God and cried and cried—inconsolably. 1 Samuel 1:9,10
As I reread this story in preparation to write this post ,I  realized that maybe God doesn't fill our heart holes of longing on purpose. 
Sure He can. He's God. He can do anything he wants. 
But maybe, just maybe, God instead uses the hole of a desire not yet met to beckon us to Him - like He did with Hannah. 
I am rather familiar with this hole. This hole has left me "pulling myself together" in public quit often. It is the thing that leaves me crying at my desk as I write these posts. It is the thing that leaves me questioning if God will be faithful in this area of my life. It is this hole, this empty space, that leaves me no choice but to live in utter surrender to my Jesus. 
The words of the old hymn come to mind: 

All to the, my precious savior. I surrender all.

So yes. Jesus can fill the hole, but He hasn't because it's still there. It's just up to me if I will let the hole of longing, the hole of a desire not yet met draw me to Him. To seek His face in the place of my longing. It is my opportunity to dethrone my longing and enthrone the only One who is able to fill those empty spaces just as he did with Hannah through Samuel.