Sunday School Lesson: Jesus Will Fill That Sad Hole In Your Heart

Yesterday I got to help run Sunday school. Having the ability to play guitar meant I got the easy job of doing the music. After the music I got to learn that if we have a sad hollow feeling in our lives Jesus can fill that void and make us feel better. To some extent I have found this thought to be true. My Christian faith has given me a framework to look at the world that can make everything seem that little bit easier to bear. But, as I got to the end of high school and beyond, whilst Jesus did seem to be somehow filling a sad hollow ache in my heart, that sad hollow ache continued to grow and grow, but Jesus's ability to fill it did not. There are plenty of parallel experiences. Finding a girlfriend, having a child, getting out of a bad job into a good job, even buying a new guitar. For a while the joy of these things buries the pain and sadness but the joy is limited. It is like in the picture of my life I get to zoom into that one new thing and all I see is joy. But, eventually I will zoom out I will take in the whole picture where that new joy is but one small part.

Perhaps this is what rubs me the wrong way about this Sunday school message. The messssage that we can keep living our lives exactly as we have been and continue to live our lives exactly as the world recommends and as long as we pop a Jesus pill every morning or put Jesus in our hearts everything will be fine. Maybe, we also need to repent. Not in just the moralistic sense (as it is so often exclusively framed) but in a wholistic sense to turn our whole lives around and live in a new way to question the long work hours, high mortgage, high consumption lives that have been handed to us. Maybe we don't need to just add Jesus to the picture but to follow Jesus means completely redrawing the picture.