Have you ever reached a point in your life when you were experiencing extreme loneliness or feelings of emptiness, even when you had no real reason to feel that way? I already had a relationship with God, but I’d never really gone after it the way I should have. There was a lot of loneliness and self‑doubt going on in my life at that time, and the hopelessness was just an everyday thing by then.
Whether or not a person already has everything they ever wanted in life, or they’re still in the midst of pursuing their dreams, everyone has the kind of days that just scream, “Hey, this is as good as it’s ever gonna’ get. What’s the use?”
What is the difference between living a life with God versus living a life without His presence? What is that feeling of emptiness? On certain days, it feels big enough to drive a semi-truck through.
We all have goals in life that we believe if we can achieve these particular goals, then we’d be happy. For some, it may be the pursuit of money. For others, it might just be the love of a good partner or spouse. Could it be that having children might fill the void? How about fame, power, sex, or one of a hundred other things we might chase after, as we grow older? We all have our own perception of what we think it’s going to take to put us at peace with the world.
If we are very lucky, we achieve our goals, and for a while, we feel pretty good about ourselves and life in general. As time passes by, we gradually fall back into the trap of thinking that way again. The newness wears off, and we are once again, restless. If I can only have this, that, or the other, then I know I’ll be happy, but it just never quite ends up working out that way.
I personally tried sex, love, alcohol, money, material, power, and ended up even more empty than I was before. It became simply unbearable. Broken hearts and buckets of money coming and going were the norm. Sex was temporarily fulfilling, and when it was over, the hole in my heart only seemed to grow larger. Beer made me forget I was lonely, and money was used to buy things to make me happy for a brief time. And there it was again—the hole—growing larger, growing wider, growing deeper, and always growing darker.
One night, I was lying on the sofa after a long weekend of partying. I was so depressed, and I had a gun I had taken from my parent’s security box. I decided that it was time to put it to good use. I was going to let the pistol do what pistols do. I had just broken up with someone I’d been dating for a long time, and on top of that, I had just lost my job. I was living at home with my parents at age 26, and no amount of drinking was going to make me forget all of these things.
I couldn’t find the mystery ingredient that was eluding me. The one that was supposed to make me happy. I had searched and searched, and it just wasn’t there. I pulled the gun out from underneath the cushions where I had hidden it earlier in the day and placed the barrel of the 22-caliber pistol to my temple. I decided that I owed God a quick explanation before I ended the life that He had given me 26 years earlier. I was angry. I was very angry at this God who had let me down.
I had gotten saved at the age of 12 but never really taken it seriously. My half-hearted efforts and my selfish prayers never revealed the God I always had heard was there. I had just about convinced myself that it was all just a big hoax and that He didn’t really exist at all, yet I still felt the need to let God be my last thought.
As a last act of desperation, I cried out…”God, if you are really there, then you have one last ---- chance to let me know it. I am going to do this, so if you really give a -----, you better say something now. I’m going to count to 10, and if you don’t prove to me you really care, then it’s over .
At some point, between 10 and 0, I felt a brilliant tingle come over my whole body. I often refer to it as feeling like a scene from the movie Cocoon, where the lead character is in a swimming pool, and this alien creature who had transformed herself into this ball of light or energy slams Steve Guttenberg in the chest, and his whole body recoils. Every hair on his body stands on end. Something had slammed my whole body, and I instinctively knew that God had reached out to me in a powerful way.
Immediately all of my pain and anger and loneliness disappeared, and I was filled head to toe with a peace like I had never known. I slowly lowered the gun and slipped it back under the cushion. I knew everything was going to be different from that moment on.
The next morning I awoke and went straight to my Bible—a Bible I hadn’t opened in years. I felt as though the presence of Jesus had just swept all over me, and I began to read. I can only tell you that the feeling lasted. It didn’t go away, and my life always has meant something ever since.
I only told you all of this because maybe I can save you some pain. Maybe I can’t. I know I had to get so desperate that I was willing to die in order to end the hopelessness of living a life without God. Whenever I try to talk to non-believers or agnostics, I am always met with walls of doubt and questions that seem endless. I only have one motive here—to reach out to those who want and need hope and peace in their lives and point them to a place where they can find it.
I can do that easy enough, but it’s like the old saying goes. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Well I’m going to point out the water (Jesus Christ) and then hope to see if I can’t convince any nonbelievers or fence sitters that taking a drink is a very good thing, not only for your body, but for your eternal soul as well.
If I fail to reach you, then maybe God will come knocking one night with you as He did with me. To me, the true beginning of life is when you have reached the end of self. It’s a place in your life where you cry out and hope and pray that someone is listening. We’re usually in deep trouble and depressed, stressed, and all the rest. Mostly though, we’ve run out of hope, and we are dangling at the end of a very short rope.
Does this sound familiar to anyone out there? We want someone who cares not just about us, in general, but cares about us in specifics. That is the way that God loves us, which is unique to Him and Him alone. He loves us even with our looming doubts and insecurities.
We all have them but would probably never tell anyone about them for fear of exposing ourselves to the world. We need someone who knows we are hopeless on our own but are willing to help us and accept us anyway. This person is Jesus Christ. He already knows everything about you, so all you have to do is get to know Him. Who better to become friends with, then someone who knows all there is to know about you and still loves you and accepts you anyway?
If you aren’t a believer, you may regard all of this as just a bunch of meaningless hype. You’re already skeptical of His existence and this whole organized religion thing as well. (To be honest, I am not a huge fan of organized religion myself.) You might also be convinced that none of this can be proven, or that a 2000-year-old story is not even worth listening to. Am I right?
All I can share with you is my personal experience. What can Jesus offer you that you don’t have already as a nonbeliever? How about contentedness, hope, peace, understanding, love, self-acceptance, purpose in life, and a host of other positives, not to mention, some pretty nice real estate in a subdivision called Heaven? It also comes with an incredible view and a really wonderful landlord that is available to help you 24/7. The really great thing is that it won’t cost you a cent. It was bought and paid for some 2,000 years ago, and all you have to do is claim it.
God Bless,
David Allen Brown
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