I Have This Huge Hole In My Heart

Sometimes I feel that there is a huge hole in my heart that nothing on earth could ever fill. Not wealth, not power, not fame, not even the love of a special person. This hole is so huge I could easily fall within in. Many times, in the course of daily life, I somehow forget. But when I remember, what terrible pain is there! What hunger and what emptiness. I have a thirst within me not even all the oceans of the world could possibly fill.

I’m reminded of what St. Teresa of the Andes told her father once:

“I wanted to be happy and searched for happiness everywhere. I dreamed of being very rich, but I saw that over night rich people can become poor. And even if at times it doesn’t happen, one sees that on the one hand riches abound, and on the other hand, people are overwhelmed by poverty of affection and unity. I’ve thought of happiness in the affection of a perfect young man, but the very idea that some day he might love me with less enthusiasm or that he could die, leaving me alone in the struggles of life, makes me reject the idea that by marrying I’ll be happy. No. This doesn’t satisfy me. For me, happiness is not found there. Where, then, I ask myself, is it to be found? Then I understood that I hadn’t been born for earthly things but for eternal ones. Why go on denying this fact any longer? Only in God has my heart found its rest. With God my soul found itself fully satisfied, so that I desire nothing in this world but to belong to Him completely.” (St. Teresa of the Andes to her father, Letter 73)

I also remember Jesus and the woman at the well.

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. So where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”

Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

– John 4:10-14, WEB-BE

The hole in my heart is so huge that only God Himself could ever fill it! The problem is that I often forget. I forget that without God, I would always be empty deep inside.

Sometimes I Forget

Sometimes I forget.
I forget how beautiful
You are
And how no one
In all the world
Can ever replace you.

When I forget,
I settle
For what is less,
I try to fill that big void
In my heart
With things
That could never fill it
No matter how hard I try
Or how long I look.

When I forget,
I do all sorts
Of foolish things,
Just so I can
Numb that ache
That never seems
To go away,
That seems to tell me more
Than what I can presently
Understand.

In truth,
It is this very ache,
This inner wound
That eventually reminds me
That there is something
Out there that is
Far bigger and more wonderful
Something far more satisfying
Than I can ever dream about.

There is something
There is someone
Who alone
Can reach
The very depths if me,
Who alone can touch
My very soul,
And even if I may forget
I know He will find a way
To bring me home.

“The frailties of our humanity, to never be satisfied, to always be seeking, perhaps that is what God used as our greatest strength... holes in our hearts so big, only he can fill them.” - Full of Grace (film)