Christ: My Source For Completeness

Christ: My Source For Completeness

It is in [Christ] that God gives a full and complete expression of himself in bodily form. Moreover, your own completeness is realised in him. –Colossians 2:9-10 (PHILLIPS)

Incomplete. That is the only way I know to describe how our family feels at times. The three of us have a great time together and our house is full of joy, but at times we are painfully aware that Hope and Gabe are missing, and we feel the void.

Hope’s birthday falls the week of Thanksgiving, so in a desire to create a new memory and escape the emptiness at home that first Thanksgiving, we decided to take a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I dropped by a friend’s house shortly before the trip in an effort to reconnect. I was telling her about our plans to stay in a bed-and-breakfast and visit the Biltmore mansion. “It should be fun,” she said, “won’t it?”

Yes, I thought, but not like you’re thinking. Honestly, I can’t remember what I said out loud, but I remember thinking that if she and her family went off to a ski lodge for the holiday without one of their sons, she might better understand how I felt. They would have a great time, but as they sat by the fire playing cards, they would think to themselves, This is fun, but it would really be fun if Peter were here, if our family were complete. I wished she could understand that in every experience we have—good or bad—there is an aching awareness that we are not complete.

But I know better than to think that if Hope and Gabe were here, their presence would assure a sense of completeness. That would be foolishly sentimental. While the void created by the losses in our lives is very real, it only punctuates the deeper void we feel when we realize that no person can make us feel whole and complete. We can never feel completely safe or completely satisfied unless we nestle ourselves in the bosom and being of Christ, where we find the completeness we lack. In him we find full confidence, complete understanding, total acceptance. “For in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). Won’t you give up looking for completeness in anyone or anything other than Christ?

Christ, you are the One who completes me, and without you I would be eternally and hopelessly incomplete. Use the losses in my life to show me that you are my only source for the completeness I crave.

DIGGING DEEPER