You realize it when the noise quiets, when the day draws to an end, when you're hurt and rejected, when it's just you and the silence in your bedroom darkness:

There is a hole in your soul, a pit waiting to be filled.

I often step around it - this deep well - stubbornly trying to ignore its existence and not worry, just be happy.

Ha.

Though it isn't filled, stuff still bubbles out.

It's where the longing blows through, the thirst for joy flows from, where the pain erupts out of. Our dreams, desires, expectations float out of the hole, and we attempt to chase them, to meet them, thinking we can fill the hole ourselves. Maybe our pursuits and pleasures we'll bring happiness.. one day. "One day," we'll be content. But we never get there, never catch the firefly.

Why can't we find satisfaction for longer than a season, a day?

Why doesn't the hole go away?

Wake up to the facts and ask the hard questions instead of driving to distraction: That hole in our soul can't be filled by the things of this world. Shoving crap in there just deepens the soul hole.

My past explodes straight out of this pit and spews me with old fears and hurts, cruelly reminding me of bottomless insecurities and low self-worth. This living volcano on my heart is easily triggered.

Don't pretend there isn't a hole in your soul too, filled or not.

It says in a book by Randy Alcorn, "Your deepest desires come from what my father called the hole in the heart."

It needs to hit me harder: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" (Mark 8:36)

Where are you going? What are you chasing? What is your reason for rolling off your bed? Don't forget it. This world is temporary. Your life is like the flicker of a candle, soon over.

What kind of water are you drinking?

A couple thousand years ago, Jesus offered the lady at the well "living water," a fountain of endless life and love that could fill the thirsting pit of her heart, deepened by the rejection of men, the wounding of women, unmet longings, by the scars of sin. Only Jesus can fill this pit, because we were made for Him, for His love.

Corrie Ten Boom, a concentration camp survivor, she wrote, "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still." She who watched her friends die, who filed past Nazis, wicked, who counted ribs, heard murdering gunfire daily, who experienced great evils beyond imagination. No pit in your heart is too deep for the Creator of oceans and galaxies.

He still holds the living water today. Maybe He uses the Big Dipper to scoop it, sparkling with beauty and light.

Your aching heart can come home, can stop sucking in like a sick black hole and brim over with Light.

It's this living water that fills my soul hole, laps at the edges, and spills over the rim.

When I'm angry and distrustful, when I wander from God, I start brattily kicking the living water out so that I can stuff some of my own merchandise into the pit,

though I know it'll just splatter out back onto me in the form of despair and discontentment.

I dare, I dare you, to drink deeply from Christ all day every day and stop lapping the refreshments the world offers on a silver platter.

Seems like everyone nowadays is soaking in the wisdom of the world, chasing empty pleasures and ambitions, drinking the poison that only shrivels their searching souls.

Living water flows at our feet. Jesus calls, nail-scarred hands open and waiting, eyes on yours. Scripture tells He is never far from any one of us.

He is the One who tells us everything we've ever done, and loves us still. He stares our millions of fragmented failures straight in the face, looks down our deep pit of trash. . . and He doesn't turn away disgusted.

Instead, He holds out living water to the outcast, the enemy, to us, and calls us friends, repeating "Follow Me" as we stare, mouths gaping, hearts softening.

And His laughter, His smile, as He says this echoes down the sands of time, and I'm left breathless, filled with the overwhelming wonder of it.

I'll never be empty and thirsting again, and I laugh at the sorrowful joy of the thought, that He would be pierced Himself to fill my hole.

And so I'll follow Him unto death, to eternity's shore, God help me.

"It is well with my soul."

What of you?