“We don’t want to admit that despite a steadfast faith and our best efforts at obedience, none of us have fully found what we’re looking for. We’re driven to seek, but we never fully find it on earth. Christ’s purpose in our lives is never to offer total fulfillment today. Instead, Jesus heals us from the past, provides joy and contentment in the present, and offers certain hope that our deepest longings will be fulfilled in the future.”
“I Found It”. This slogan was used by an evangelistic organization back in the mid-1970s as a creative way to spread the gospel through mass marketing techniques. As a child growing up during that era, I remember yellow “I Found It” bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards, and advertisements appearing everywhere around our home town. But as I look back at that campaign, I wonder how effective the slogan really was. There’s some truth in the message, but “I Found It” seems too simplistic and perhaps even misleading to describe the Christian faith. After all, believers aren’t immune to problems: we still struggle with addictions, experience tragedy, and make lousy decisions. We get a taste of Jesus Christ and his fantastic plans for us in the future, but never experience them fully as long as we are living in this fallen world.
In one of their best known songs from their entire discography, U2 sings about an incomplete journey of faith in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” [Lyrics] [iTunes]. On the surface, the title may sound like a confession of unbelief. But, in reality, the song is an honest look at the struggle that all believers face as we seek a fulfilled life.
Flickers
A longing. It’s the pang in your stomach when you’re in love. You can sense it as you gaze over the glorious snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Rockies. You can feel it in your soul during a great worship or prayer time. C.S. Lewis observed that this intense desire, which he refers to as “joy”, is for something that nothing on earth ever truly quenches. You can catch a glimpse of it, but this longing is fleeting. In his poem Dymer, Lewis reflects on joy’s unattainable nature: “Joy flickers on the razor-edge of the present and is gone.” Lewis believed that was exactly how God intended it, that joy is meant to be a clue or a pointer to the fact we are made for another place, for his “far off country.” In “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, U2 explores our search for joy, as we seek fulfillment for that deep longing inside each of us. As the song begins, Bono sings of his efforts at finding God:
I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
