And he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us. // Acts 17:26-27
Years ago, I got an email not long after I gave birth to our daughter Isabel. Isabel is our sixth child and our only girl, a daughter after five sons.
The writer of this email was a mama of all boys, no daughter, and she expressed a certain sadness.
“I feel like I have a hole in my heart that only a daughter can fill.”
This woman’s deep longing is certainly something we can all relate to. How many of us have something in our own life, a hole in our heart, that we are waiting to have filled. Maybe we think these feelings will shift when our older children are “launched.” Maybe we think it will be better when our marriage is through a bumpy patch. Perhaps you think it is the spouse you are longing for or the baby you dream of.
It’s easy to allow circumstances in our lives put us in a strange holding pattern, and we might think the ache we experience in our heart will be eased by resolution in some temporal matter.
I remember writing back to this woman and telling her that Isabel was indeed a joyful surprise. We didn’t know we were having a girl, and she did fill a missing spot we didn’t even know we had.
“But the hole in your heart,” I told the woman, and I reminded myself, “is something that can only be filled by God.”
As the scripture from Acts says today, God made this life so that we are indeed seeking Him—groping for Him!—and then finding Him. But we must learn this important lesson: that the thing inside each one of us that seeks and lacks and knows something is missing, this is the God-sized hole that only He can fill.
God can fill it, and He so desperately longs to fill it. He waits for you—“indeed he is not far from any one of us”—ready to quench the thirst and take the yoke and ease the longing each one of us has for our good, good Father.
God can fill it. // Rachel BalducciClick to tweet
Rachel Balducci has a Masters degree from the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia and teaches at Augusta University. She and her husband Paul have five sons and one daughter and are part of an intentional Christian community in Augusta, Georgia. Rachel is the author of several books and is the co-host of The Gist of CatholicTV. Find out more about her here.
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