Human beings are unique among the creatures of the world. We are “wise” and became this way when God breathed his Spirit into us. “The Man came alive — a living soul!” (Gen. 2:7 MSG), the Bible says.
But alive and wise to what?
Sociologists tell us we became so in several ways. We became self-conscious, self-aware, romantic and not just instinctual. We became conscious of the universe and began wondering what our place within it is. We organized ourselves socially, creatively, behaviorally and began pondering deeper, more profound existential questions than any of the animals could ever hope to ask.
We also came alive religiously, drawing on walls or sketching the stars out of a desire to connect to the gods, always reaching out for something, or someone, beyond us. We became awake to the idea that there was a person, or persons, behind or above or beyond this world.
The Law of Religion
This phenomenon is so common around the world that Yuval Harari, in his book Sapiens, calls it “The Law of Religion.” He says this has been the third great unifier of humankind — alongside money and empires — throughout history. Every people group on every continent in every era has been religious: the Egyptians, the Polynesians, the Mayans, the Greeks; from Mesopotamia to Persia, from China to South America, you will find similarities. There are temples, drawings, stories, sacred writings, sacrifices, priestly systems, prayers, and songs. Every culture in history has had these, long before they ever interacted with one another. One of the distinct things about human beings as a species is that we worship.
We know at some level that we are more than just meat and synapses. Deep inside we know we are more than what we see, taste, or touch. We have something else written into us, telling us there is meaning and emotion and love and beauty, what C. S. Lewis called our “lifelong nostalgia”: “our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and the healing of that old ache.”
Sometime after God made us in his image, we began doing something that nothing else in the world does. We began longing. We sensed something missing and felt a desire to connect to the One who made us and the kind of world he created for us — a world with no more crying, or pain, or death. No more terrorism, or depression, or heart attacks that steal those we love. No more single moms trying their best, or dads so lost they take their own lives, like a man from our church recently did. No more earthquakes, or child abuse, or divorce, or poverty. No more racism, or hatred, or disease, or pandemics. Then and only then, when we find this world, or the One who can take us there, does the heart settle.
The Secular Epidemic and the Search for Home
This is why while there are several secular theories about how to find happiness and fulfillment and meaning as human beings, none of them adequately answer the problem of our longings. A century after testing out the secular answers to those longings, and adding to our lives the technology to connect us, the medicine that can heal us, and the psychology that can explain us, the Western world is worse off. We are more depressed, more suicidal, more anxious, and more lost than ever:
- 60% of college students meet the criteria for a mental health condition.
- 84% of Gen Z report burnout.
- Suicide rates are at an all-time high — more than tripling among fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in the past two decades (the United States alone has an average of 49,000 per year, which is twice the number of homicides, making suicide one of the top ten causes of death for nearly every age group).
- Up to 90% of doctor’s office visits are for stress-related symptoms.
- The pandemic tripled the rate of depression in adults in all demographic groups.
- Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health challenge, affecting forty million adults in the United States alone (10% of the population).
All of this is what secular culture is producing in us. Because the problem with trying to live without God is that we ignore the way we were made, and we do so to our own demise.
The search for “home,” as Saint Augustine called it, the state of being at peace with God, is what our whole life is about, and nothing causes us more pain than our disconnection from and denial of that journey. It is the worst kind of homesickness.
“In my experience,” the Christian thinker and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison camp before he was killed, “nothing tortures us like longing. . . . When we are forcibly separated from those we love, we simply cannot, like so many other things, contrive for ourselves some cheap substitute…. There have been a few occasions in my life when I have had to learn what homesickness means. There is no agony worse than this.”
So it is true, what the theologian Donald Bloesch contends in his journals, that “our greatest affliction is not anxiety, or even guilt, but rather homesickness — a nostalgia, a yearning to be at home with God.”
This is what “the fall” story is in the biblical narrative — how we ended up separated from the One we love most, the One who loves us most, and all the dysfunction that came from it. The fall explains why we are homesick and why the longing to return home is such a powerful image of redemption. Jesus himself uses this longing for home in his famous parable about the prodigal son, who returns home to his village and his father after a life of immorality and selfishness that would have been punishable by death in that culture.
Instead, he is met with grace.
“The image of coming home is a powerful, archetypal symbol of returning to one’s deepest self, to the soul,” writes acclaimed novelist Sue Monk Kidd. “To come home is to return to the place of inner origin, that original imprint within.” To spend our lives not settling but journeying, moving, searching, and never resting until we find our rest in God is what life is.
You Are God’s
Despite the lies our culture throws at us about who we are and who we aren’t, the biblical story says we belong to God. Jesus affirms this when he holds up the coin with Caesar’s image on it and says to the crowd, “Whose image is this?” The crowd says Caesar’s, and Jesus replies, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:16–17, emphasis added).
It begs the question, though nobody in the crowd asks it: What is God’s? The answer is obvious. Every person in the crowd is God’s, for they bear the image of God. When you look in the mirror, you should hear that question of Jesus: “Whose image do you see?” Because whatever bears the image of God is God’s. You, me, your neighbor, your ex, your boss, those people you have come to hate, the others you love so dearly — we all bear God’s image.
Our human duty, according to Jesus, then, is to give ourselves to God. We bear his image, and we belong to him, so we are to give ourselves to him. No matter how gentle or soft or cultured or smart or nice or righteous a person may be, no one experiences their full potential as a human being unless they do this. This is the human design, the reason we were created.
Never shy away from the longings of your heart and soul. Secularism has taught us to, calling them illusions, cognitive misfirings, or hopeful thinking of the weak. Rather, realize they are there as guides to lead you to finding the One your heart beats for, and then in finding him, live a life worthy of him.
Adapted from The Problem of Life: How to Find Identity, Purpose, and Joy in a Disenchanted World by Mark Clark.
In this final book of a trilogy which began with The Problem of God, Clark presents 11 practical principles to help us flourish. He explores foundational topics like our origins, identity, and the meaning of suffering while drawing from biblical theology, psychology, and engaging real-life stories.
The Problem of Life illustrates how we may be looking in all the wrong places for joy, contentment, and satisfaction — and points us toward God as the remedy for our brokenness.
Mark Clark is a Senior Pastor at Bayside Church in California. He is the author ofThe Problem of Life,The Problem of Jesus,The Problem of God, and host ofThe Mark Clark Podcast. He and his wife, Erin, have three daughters.
