A Prayer About Longings

When I desire to point others to you

MY GRACIOUS HEAVENLY FATHER,

You created humans in your image, and you put eternity in their hearts. You made them for fellowship with you. So we are incomplete without you. Yet ever since the sin in the Garden, we have tried to live our own way. Pascal said that everyone has a God-shaped vacuum—a hole in the soul that only you can fill. This vacuum is a longing for meaning, for completion, for home. Every day I see people desperately seeking, Lord. Sensing their emptiness, they try filling it with money or experiences or sex or alcohol or relationships or career successes or any number of other things. I want to reach these people for you, Lord. They are my neighbors and coworkers and friends. Father, please make me sensitive to when they hit bottom or I sense that their search has been futile. Give me opportunities to present the truth of the gospel. Jesus is the only way to you, and I need to share that in love. Help them to be restless until they rest in you.

God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11