By Brenda Cannon Henley
As a personal study of my own, I started reading last week about the “God-shaped hole” that many scholars, Bible teachers, pastors, speakers, and individuals believe exists in every human being. In my exciting discoveries about the subject, I find many who claim it to be a biblical principle of importance, while others suggest it is not even Scriptural.

I do know that as I became an adult and began to study the Word of God, I found that every man and woman I knew seemed to be striving for something or reaching for a goal that I did not quite understand. Some thought it to be money. Others power. Some sought for great beauty. Many chose travel and fine homes in which to live, but when it came to the end of the day, and all was quiet, each had a need for something more secure than worldly goods and bank accounts. And because of serving on a very large church staff and traveling in an international ministry, I’ve had occasion to see many good people arrive at death’s door, and I have observed how they made their crossing. Those who had made peace with God, or loved and trusted Him to fill the God-shaped hole in their lives, seemed to have a better time of transition to what I believe is Heaven.

One man wrote that the idea of a God-shaped hole in the human heart, a terrifying bottomless abyss opening up inside us which we would do anything to fill, is a famous modern metaphor for the yearning in the human heart which drives individuals on their spiritual quest. He said the phrase is given as a quote from the famous philosopher and mathematician Pascal (1623-1662) who wrote in his Pensees — “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can only be filled with an infinite God?”

Another scholar wrote that when Pascal wrote this (it wasn’t published until after his death), he was likely thinking of a famous passage at the beginning of St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” where the great African saint said to God, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.” And Augustine went on to say that he wanted God to come and dwell in him. Augustine closes out his writing by saying that we encounter God above as Truth, and at that moment of insight in which God’s grace opens our blinded eyes to this important truth about ourselves and God and the world, we are enabled for our souls to be healed and our lives remade in finer and better form.

On a personal note here, I trusted Christ or ask God to fill the void in my own life at a Christian Missionary Alliance summer camp for teens at Toccoa Falls Bible College in the beautiful North Georgia Mountains. My grandmother had seen the need for me to attend and had paid my way. I had not been reared in church and had little Bible teaching, but I knew once I heard the songs sung and the message given clearly that I did not have the peace these people knew and modeled. A young man from Cuba stood and walked to the platform under the open tabernacle and sang “The Love of God,” and I sensed something very special deep within my being. The soloist could barely speak English, but the words to the song came out beautifully and they clearly spoke to my heart.

During this Thanksgiving Season of 2013, I am thankful to God that He, through the power of the Holy Spirit of God, in the summer of 1958, spoke to my teenage heart, gave me courage to step out and admit I surely had this God-shaped hole in my soul, and that I was willing to have someone help me find the peace I so desperately longed for in my life. A dear cousin walked with me and introduced me to an adult woman counselor who took me into a counseling room and answered question after question.

It was there during a quiet and blessed moment that I bowed my head and submitted my hard, stubborn will, and asked the God who made Heaven and earth to come into my life and fill that horrible void and vacuum. That was now 55 years ago and I can testify to the fact that He has never left me or forsaken me.

Brenda Cannon Henley can be reached at (409) 781-8788 or at [email protected].

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