^“29 And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. ³⁰ For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. ³¹ But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” -Luke 12:29-31(NIV)

What do we do when we feel something necessary to a full life is missing from our experience and has been for years? I’m not talking about something trivial or minor like a non-essential material possession or some rarely-given human talent we do not happen to possess. What if we are without spouse, or children, or a career that seems to have any eternal value? What if the thing in question appears to us as being an integral part of what God designed to make us whole human beings?

Many Christ-followers live lives that seem incomplete because one or more of things like this are not present (and do not appear likely to be present anytime soon). In their absence what is present is a sense of emptiness, of meaninglessness, and frustration. Millions of people who profess Christ as their Lord and Savior know what it is to exist in a daily state of depression that is directly related to not having what they are certain are needs in their lives.

The Bible, of course, does not promise us spouses, children and careers that fulfill us the way we think they ought. What it does promise is that those needs which really are needs will be met in us if we seek first, as Christ taught us to do in the above verses in Luke, “his kingdom.” The implication in that promise is that God will provide what is truly necessary if we put Him first (in this case clothing and food)

That is difficult for a lonely, childless or unemployed believer to accept because it implies something else, two things actually, one is that we may not already be putting God first and the other is that, even if we are, the things we think are needs are actually wants. No serious Christians like to believe either possibility is true about them. No one wants to think they are not seeking enough after the Lord and no one wants to think the thing they desire, sometimes to the point of desperation, isn’t a real need. But that is one of the implications of these verses.

There is no getting around it.

God is not in the habit of making reality fit our idea of what it should be. Accepting hard truths about life in a fallen world is part of what it means to be Christian. The fact that “life is difficult”, as author M. Scott Peck once began one of his books is something to which we must reconcile ourselves or find ourselves embittered. There is no getting around that either.

I do not write this to be deliberately harsh. I’ve felt wants that feel like needs too. I write it because even the felt absence of that which we think we cannot live without is something with which we can live. Beyond that we can find in our dilemma the path to giving up wrong priorities or wrong ideas about what is truly necessary in this life. Like so many other adversities the sense of missing out on something “essential” in our present existence can prove to be a path to wisdom and maybe even contentment, both of which are great blessings. Such wisdom is something else we need to seek from God.

It’s something to think about the next time we think we are being unfairly denied by the God we call our own.