The Emptiness of Autonomy

Word Points ^ | July 30, 2005 | Gary Henry

[TheTruthess]

The Emptiness of Autonomy

Hell and Destruction are never full;
So the eyes of man are never satisfied.

Proverbs 27:20

When God does not occupy His rightful place in our hearts, one result is that we spin our wheels in a frustrating search for satisfaction.  Independence and autonomy seem like they would be more satisfactory than a constant state of neediness, but their promise turns out to be empty.  The more we take control of our own fulfillment, the more fulfillment seems to slip away from us.  What began as an adventure becomes an exhausting grind.  "All things are full of labor; man cannot express it.  The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing" (Ecclesiastes 1:8).  Apart from God, our desires are insatiable.

One of the great ironies of our existence as created beings is that our completeness requires that we keep in touch with our incompleteness!  One would think that by dispensing with "unrealistic" needs for anything infinite or supernatural we would find the finite and the natural to be more rewarding.  After all, less can often be more.  But to our surprise, we find that the single greatest requirement for deep earthly enjoyment is an admission that the most important piece of this world's puzzle is missing.  We think we'd like to do away with our neediness, but we discover that we need to need God.  "The more complete our sense of need, the more satisfactory is our dependence on God" (Oswald Chambers).

God is always inviting us to acknowledge our emptiness and come back to Him.  He is waiting for us to seek Him.  "Ho!  Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat.  Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.  Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?  Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, let your soul delight itself in abundance" (Isaiah 55:1,2).  Our attempted self-rule has been a sad experiment.  The results have been shockingly disappointing.  At last, is it not time for honesty to open a new path?.

The vast neurotic misery of the world could be termed a neurosis of
emptiness.  Men cut themselves off from the root of their being, from God,
and then life turns empty, inane, meaningless, without purpose.  So when
God goes, goal goes.  When goal goes, meaning goes.  When meaning
goes, value goes, and life turns dead on our hands.

Carl Gustav Jung

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Copyright © 2005 by Gary Henry
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[GSlob]

Depends on your level of [general] creativity. The higher it is, the less empty and bored you will ever feel - and the more autonomy you will crave. But to be able to create fulfillment de nihil is not easy, and is not for all and sundry.