Why Nothing Satisfies: Disordered Loves and the Clue of Unmet Longings
A few years ago I visited a friend who serves as a pastor in Hawaii. The moment I stepped off the plane, I understood why they call it paradise. Warm breeze. Turquoise water. Lush mountains draped in greenery. I said to my friend, “Everything is so great here! If people are living in paradise, how will anyone ever realize their need for Jesus?” Without hesitation he replied, “In Hawaii, everyone knows they should be happy because they’re in paradise. But they know they’re not happy, which is when they start to ask questions.”
Notice how we only ask questions when the story isn’t working. C. S. Lewis comments on this:
Most people, if they really learn how to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us . . . are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers; I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.x
Lewis suggests that if nothing in this world satisfies us completely, perhaps we were made for something beyond this world. It is right and good to look for happiness, but we’re inevitably looking for something that ordinary life can’t provide. In other words, unmet longings aren’t a curse; they’re a clue. Lewis wrote, “A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. . . . If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can meet, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”xi
Christianity observes that we’re discontent because our loves are disordered. It’s not that we love our work, our spouse, or other things too much; it’s that we love God too little in relation to those other things.xii The problem isn’t the intensity of our loves; it’s the order. Stoic and Eastern thought says our problem is loving material things in the first place; we need to detach ourselves from them. Our current culture says material things are all that exist, so we must latch on to them. Christianity says the problem is that we love the most important things too little and the least important things too much. We need to reorder them.
Dad said, “Reordering love means we do not need to love things less, but love God more than anything else.”xiii When we love God first, all other loves fall into their rightful place. For instance, if you love your career more than your family, you’ll damage your family—not because you don’t love them, but because your love for your career has become disordered. There’s nothing wrong with loving your career, but this love must be rightly ordered.
Alternatively, as you seek to be a loving family member, if you start making your family your god, hoping they will complete you, you’ll put impossible demands on them and be crushed by every disappointment while crushing them with unrealistic expectations. Ironically, by loving your family more than God, you end up harming your family, because you’re asking them to provide what only God can give.
If God is your greatest love, you can love your work and love your family—believing that success and failure in both endeavors matter—but neither love will destroy you because your worth is rooted in God’s love, not in what happens at work or in your family. You can value your work and care for your family without asking them to cure you or give you ultimate purpose.
How do you know if you have disordered loves? Three questions reveal your priorities. (1) What makes you most anxious in life? The things that steal your peace often reveal what you’re depending on for security. (2) Where does your mind go when it wanders? Your daydreams reveal your desires. What you fantasize about reveals the things you believe will make you happy. (3) What do you spend money on most freely? Bank statements don’t lie. Where you put your expendable income often points to the things you believe will give you life. Asking yourself these questions can reveal the areas where your loves are out of order.
- Taken from The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will by (Michael Keller and Timothy Keller). Copyright © September 2026 by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.
