Promises of satisfaction
Have you ever looked around and realized that the world is just replete with promises of satisfaction? Think about it!
Blockbuster movies, parties with friends, breakaway shopping sprees, travel trips, hunting for music, chasing good books, enjoying food, and all the colorful product advertisements everywhere – do they not all target at our search for satisfaction? And the world is just full of such promises of satisfaction – that it is blinding.
Many of them are short-lived. Some of them are lies. We all know. Yet it is easy to get lost, and in the process, all we end up thinking and speaking of is about ourselves. All of this is like “a chasing after the wind”, as the book of Ecclesiastes aptly puts it.
There is much more to say, but I’ll stop. It actually takes some effort to think about this in the context of our personal lives (yours and mine)! But tell me what you think.
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i guess that’s the way we have to live now (or ever, in that case). if there was no need for satisfaction, there would be no need for existence.
kinda the same with daily entertainment products (or whatever you wanna call it). much as it could be the best thing you’ve experienced in your life, there is always that need to step it up and satisfy another part of you, or else everything just lies stagnant.
…just a tad different from what you were talkin about, but it makes sense, right?
hey, thanks for the comment! yup, what you said made absolute sense, and it wasn’t too different from what i was talking about at all!
what i was getting at is that the fact that we need to find new (and probably weirder and yet weirder) things all the time to satisfy us again and again means that we might really be missing something – these “temporary” things that we do to fill in this gap are short-lived – hence the phrase “a chasing of the wind” – ephemeral, meaningless, of no ultimate value in the end. that’s how i read it; it is as if there is a hole that we need to fill.
but to conclude my point, i have to be really preachy… haha (but i’ll make it short!) – i believe this “hole” is because of the concept of eternity that is put in everyone’s heart (something stretching beyond the today and tomorrow that we live in). what do you think? from this point of view, i think of (and it makes sense…) Jesus saying to the Samaritan woman “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.” There is a coming back to a relationship with our Creator that satisfies us.
end preachiness. i don’t know what your thoughts are, but i hope i didn’t lose you there!!
take care
What’s interesting is the cause-effect relationship of satisfaction. I agree with completely that everything we do on a daily basis is generally in search of some sort of satisfaction…which leads me to think that if we’re all looking for the same thing, we must all be missing the same thing. I think it’s evidence that we all have that same [God-shaped] hole in our hearts that needs filling.
a God-shaped hole – you said it better than i could – thanks! but i didn’t really get what you meant by the cause-effect relationship of satisfaction; mind elaborating?
I just meant that people sometimes think of “the search for satisfaction” as the cause of the problem, and whatever results is an effect of that; but if we think about it, the hole in our hearts is the cause of EVERYTHING and our search for satisfaction is the effect of that. Satisfaction is not the beginning of the story, basically.
I think we all struggle, at some point in our lives, to draw the line where we stop and actually find true satisfaction. It gets so confusing, especially these days when the world has a lot to offer, that most of end up becoming self-serving and forgetting all the rest that’s essential to us.
yea i agree. i think the question is what satisfies us truly – because if we knew, then we wouldn’t have to waste so much time looking around (and time is limited – we don’t want to end up at 80 years old and think crap my life is meaningless). surely temporary things – things that only last for a short time and then disappear – do not cut it. if we think about it, that’s because we have eternity put in us. And I believe there’s a “God-shaped” hole in everyone of our hearts, too – that’s why people worship things, and that’s why it takes effort to fight the concept of God. That’s just my thoughts, anyway ;p
Take care!
有句话不知道用在回应你的感想是否适用。‘快活是短暂的，喜乐是长久的。’前者是种‘反应’，代表不断从物质生活上索取满足，是受到外界活动刺激后的反应，而后者是种‘态度’来自内心对生命价值正确的认识，用深远的眼光看待眼下的境遇，无论好坏，不予斤斤计较，不上下攀比，因而心怀宽广，充满感恩。一个‘反应’稍纵即逝，而一种‘态度’却是一个人生活方式。
嗯，同意，但我觉得即使有了这美丽的《来自内心对生命价值正确的认识》，生命若没有恢复与神的关系，最终还是虚空。不知道您怎么想？
请问您是哪一位？谢谢留言！
very nice ~~~
very nice, Joseph, very nice!
enjoyed much and agreed a lot ~~~
So grateful for having a friend who has this mind and heart like you :)
Wx