Dandelion. Credit: Creative Commons, Public Domain Photos

A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. ~Prov 27

I’ll never forget when I first heard this proverb. I was at ACU’s Leadership Summit, and a man named Mike Haley quoted it as he recounted the life God freed him from: 12 years of living a gay lifestyle.

Haley described his upbringing, the factors that drew him towards homosexuality, and the path he took. He spared few details & painted a vivid portrait of the life he explored to the fullest.

One point was clear: In Mike’s upbringing, he’d had a deep, gnawing “soul” hunger that wasn’t met at home. So at age 11, when an older man took special interest in him, Haley’s need for a caring father figure was finally met. He found love & acceptance for the first time, but the man’s impure intentions towards Haley introduced him to a lifestyle that would take over a decade for him to leave.

This “loving” relationship deeply damaged Haley. When he was 18, it finally ended but left this young man raw & seeking the wrong solutions. He entered the gay community but eventually found it didn’t fulfill him no matter how many relationships & sexual encounters he had.

At his core, Haley simply needed someone to care, but (like many of us) the more he pursued emptiness, the more trapped he felt in a sin cycle he couldn’t break free from. It was the only way he knew to soothe his soul, even if it was temporary & painful. {Ever been there?}

Haley’s story rocked my world.

Though our paths differed, I understood the hunger he described & what it was like to chase broken solutions that never seemed to “feed my soul”. I knew that same desperation & the bewildered, frantic search for answers in human beings, food, music, laughs, God, anything! 

Yes, I pursued Jesus but struggled to make Him my top priority. I had too many other “promising” alternatives & didn’t wanna put all my eggs in one basket, you know? Maybe that’s why God made “Me first!” the top commandment. Breaking the first rule made breaking the rest inevitable.

The reason we chase bitter pursuits & sinful lifestyles – and call them “sweet” – is because we don’t know true satisfaction! We’ve never let God be our everything. This is why sin is so appealing to us – we’re empty, searching, and it’s calling our name. We fall for it because we don’t know there’s another way.

Praise God, Mike Haley now travels the country sharing his journey to freedom, which is miraculous & inspiring! He’s also written a book for people seeking Biblical guidance to homosexuality & steps to freedom.

As for me, it wasn’t til I exhausted other options when this question stirred my heart:

Can God Satisfy Me? Is He Enough?

I’d always believed the answer was “no”. True faith was sticking with God even in the dryest, most unsatisfying places – right?

But God challenged my outlook and began to show me that the only way I can walk His road victoriously is to find my ultimate satisfaction in Him.

After all, how many times did the Israelites rebel from God due to their “insatiable” hunger?

In the wilderness their desires ran wild, testing God’s patience in that dry wasteland. So He gave them what they asked for, but He sent a plague along with it. ~Psalm 106

If we look to ANYTHING else to complete us, we’ll find heartache on the other side. We can’t expect finite, fleeting things to deliver eternal, God-sized satisfaction. Only He can fill those shoes. Everything else has limitations.

Being satisfied in Jesus is crucial! If we aren’t fully taken with Him, we’ll spend the rest of our days chasing that which will never be enough.

So what else do we chase instead of our Father?

Ways to Chase Emptiness:

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. ~Eccl 5

They will fling their silver into the streets and their gold will become an abhorrent thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD. They cannot satisfy their appetite nor can they fill their stomachs, for their iniquity has become an occasion of stumbling. ~Ezekiel 7

You will eat but not be satisfied; your stomach will still be empty. You will store up but save nothing, because what you save I will give to the sword. You will plant but not harvest; you will press olives but not use the oil, you will crush grapes but not drink the wine. ~Micah 6

My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the Fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. ~Jeremiah 2

One of humanity’s harshest realities is our perpetual need for something to fill us – bellies, souls, & all. But did God intend for us to run on empty – or does He have a better [LASTING] solution?

I believe God sent Jesus to satisfy us completely.