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The Hunger Inside

by James Barringer  
12/11/2009 / Christian Living

If so many Christians claim to believe that there's life after death, if we say all the words we're supposed to about worldly possessions not being able to satisfy us, why do we persist in trying to give them the chance to satisfy us?

This is not a rant against materialism. It's more of a commentary on what I will call "comfortablism," the tendency of most of us to seek out the middle-class American dream. This is, of course, more unpleasant than ranting against materialism, because many more of us are guilty of comfortablism, frequently without realizing it.

Although, as I have said, we claim to believe that worldly possessions will never satisfy us, we have to admit that we sometimes allow them to. If I'm in my living room squinting at a thirteen-inch black and white TV, it's pretty easy to feel that I will be happier if only I had a larger TV. Once I actually get this TV, I will indeed be happier for a while. The possession does touch something deep inside of me, despite my frequent claims that belongings should not be able to do such a thing.

I think it's because the Bible's teachings about this life and the next life are very difficult to truly live out. 1 Peter 2 urges us, "as aliens and strangers in the world," to control our desires so that they don't control us. If we're truly aliens here, that means we weren't meant to be here. We don't belong here. This world is not our home, but we want it to be comfortable like home should be, want it to be fairly easy to live here.

My friend Salena was a missionary to Australia, and she described horrific culture shock, even in a country that is relatively similar to the United States, where English is spoken and the cuisine is recognizable. Simply being away from home was wrenching for her, to the point where she felt like she couldn't handle it. Yet after a while she adapted. Humans are good at adapting. Not-home became like-home to her. She became comfortable, and when it came time to leave, she didn't want to, because she had grown to love the place. If you replace "Australia" with "earth" in the previous sentences, you will perhaps be surprised by how closely this mirrors the human experience on earth.

So why does this place, which is not our home, which offers us only pale imitations of love, community, happiness, and joy - why does this place become satisfying to us? It is certainly not that it becomes more satisfying as we live. It's that we shrink our desires. We want security, so we build a big retirement fund and install burglar alarms on our house. That's not really the kind of security we want, but it's all we can have in this life, so we allow it to satisfy us and we stop wanting more, stop wanting the real thing. We want comfort, so rather than accept that we will always be uncomfortable here in a world that is not our true home, we buy a comfortable sized house and a comfortable sized TV in a comfortably affluent neighborhood and we convince ourselves that this is it. It's not materialism, but it is comfortablism.

The major issue, of course, is that once we've settled into a comfortable life, we have very little desire to allow ourselves to be made uncomfortable again, by exposure to global issues like poverty and broken families, issues which require social justice. My friend Jacob has observed that if global Christianity really decided to pool its resources and eradicate global hunger, we could do it. There are a billion and a half of us on the globe, Protestants and Catholics together, a fourth of the world's population. Nothing would be impossible if we really set our minds and wallets to it. But we're too busy using our wallets to buy comfort for ourselves, because in the back of our hearts we don't truly believe that eternity matters more. This is true of each one of us reading this. I doubt there are very many people reading this article on a computer older than four years, driving a car older than five years, living in a house that's not the nicest house they could afford in the most affluent neighborhood they could buy. I'm not saying that these things - owning new cars or computers - are in any way bad. I'm merely asking us why we do them, and I think the answer a lot of the time has to do with the fact that we allow these things to satisfy our small desires and make us more comfortable on planet earth. We could drive older cars or live in smaller houses if we wanted to. But we don't want to.

And no, I don't think it's a uniquely American, or even Western, phenomenon. I think it's a human phenomenon. No one wants to live their lives as aliens; it's extremely hard on the emotions. If you've ever felt culture shock while in another country, or another part of your own country, you know the feeling I'm talking about. Now imagine it constantly, every day of your life. No wonder so many people yearn for comfort in this life. God understood this so well that he spent the whole of Genesis promising Abraham and his descendants a homeland of their own so they didn't have to be strangers in a foreign land, and then God spent the books from Exodus to the end of Joshua making good on that promise. We're talking about a hunger, a hunger for belonging and calm, that goes right to the core of every human heart.

C.S. Lewis said that charity should hurt us. "There ought to be things which we should want to buy, but can't, because we have given away too much money." It's very depressing to take that to its logical end: the fact that, for the rest of my life, there will be things I want to have and simply can't. I'm doomed to go through my life disappointed and unsatisfied. I could start listing the things that I'll never have, and I'll get very depressed very quickly. I want this life to satisfy me. Even as I write this article about how such a thing is not possible, I still want it to happen. I resent God for engineering this world in such a way that it cannot meet my deepest desires.

The point of this article is to be aware of what I'm talking about, this comfortablism, and to ask honestly whether it plays any role in why we do the things we do. I think that, if we really understood that we were not meant to be comfortable on this earth, we would stop pursuing things designed solely to make us comfortable. By "things" I have been thinking mainly of belongings, but I suppose I could be talking about accomplishments, prestige, approval, etcetera. Like I've said, it's in no way bad to have these things or even to want them. It's more in the question of why we want them. And I would say that it is never too late to make a U-turn. We can realize that it's silly and futile to try scratching out a minimum amount of happiness here on earth, where happiness is impossible anyway. Instead, we can let God sustain us in our unhappiness. We can turn this discontent into a vehicle for addressing the issues in the world that really deserve addressing. But it takes some honesty in admitting that this issue of comfortablism is something that we personally are guilty of. It's not someone else's problem. It's my problem.

If you came looking for the big reveal, the big "this is how we fix the problem," I'm afraid you're about to leave disappointed. I don't have a how-to. What you do after reading this article is between you and God. I don't even want to limit his creativity by suggesting different ways he may speak to you. But I have a feeling it involves some discontent, some discomfort, and while I would very much like to be sorry for that, I really can't. I welcome anything that gets our eyes off the comforts of this world and fixes us instead on the God who created the world.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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