Our Hearts Are Restless

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The first thing my four-year-old grandson, Brett, asks when he comes to our house for a visit is, “Where are my cars, Abue?” That’s short for the Spanish “abuela,” meaning “Grandmother.” My wife, Amparo - Brett’s abuela – quickly hands them over.

The cars formerly belonged to Brett’s Dad, Sean. They’re a 24-piece set of Hot Wheels cars, trucks and buses that fascinate Brett. The interesting thing is they’re beat up and paltry compared to the huge stash of newer toys Brett has at home. But he’s always excited to play with the Hot Wheels.

This isn’t only a childhood phenomenon. How often have we gotten excited about something new only to lose interest after a few weeks or even days and go back to the tried-and-true? Our closets, garages and basements are full of stuff in which we’ve lost interest. We don’t want to give them up, of course, but we don’t use them or even think about them.  

Truth is, we are seldom satisfied. We always want more or something new, a fact on which consumer-product companies rely.

Nagging Feeling of Inadequacy
And it’s not just “stuff” that fails to satisfy. How many of us have been on vacation and become anxious that “tomorrow the vacation is going to end and I’ll have to go back to work?” Sometimes that nagging feeling of inadequacy causes us to fail to enjoy what we have or do.

It’s also true of people in our lives. There’s no experience that compares, perhaps, to new love. We fall head-over-heels for somebody, think about that person continually and are blind to faults. If we marry the person, the “honeymoon” may last only a few months or years. Then we have to get down to serious loving – living with the other’s faults and loving him/her regardless.

The word “angst” comes to mind. It’s a German word that became popular among pop psychologists a couple of decades ago. Although permanent feelings of angst can be a serious problem, the dictionary’s “informal” meaning is “a feeling of persistent worry about something trivial.” It’s something that most of us live with. (“Trivial,” of course, is relative. An issue may not seem trivial at the time, and a series of trivial events may amount to something serious.)

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Often, the angst comes from something unknown that we think is missing from our lives.

There is, I believe, a spiritual component here. St. Augustine, the fourth century theologian and philosopher, wrote a famous prayer that included, “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Augustine, by the way, led a hedonistic lifestyle as a young man, and was known for another famous prayer of that part of his life, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

In Mathew’s gospel, Jesus also had advice about angst.

…Don’t be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

How naïve, we may be tempted to say. If we don’t worry about these things, who will?

Focus on the Search
But Jesus isn’t saying we shouldn’t do what is necessary to eat, drink and clothe ourselves; just that we who are searching for God shouldn’t worry about them. Instead, we should focus on the search.

In my opinion, most of us underestimate the extent to which we are attracted to things and how much we cling to them. As for people, I believe we are to love with all our hearts, but to be realistic, we must keep in mind that no one and nothing – not even Hot Wheels – last forever.

God, on the other hand, lives outside space and time, according to the Bible and generations of philosophers and theologians. God’s “steadfast love,” says Psalm 136, “endures forever.”