A popular toy for young children is a shape sorter. It comes with little stars,circles, and squares — every shape a toddler needs to know. Each shape has a hole of the same shape to put it in. But, inevitably, the first few times thetoddler plays with the shape sorter, they will try to fit the shapes in the wrong holes.
As a young child, I learned that the star could not go into the circle holes. Being the clever child I was, I even tried to flip the star a different way, yet, it still would not go in. It can never fit. Our lives also follow these rules. We try to fill our lives (the hole) with our hobbies, our friends, school, and then we can’t understand why things don’t fit. These things aren’t bad, but they can never take the place of God in our lives. We keep pushing and pushing, but we never consider trading that star in for another shape. We can try to take good things and put them into God’s place, but they will fail to satisfy.
In C. S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, Lewis describes a mother who loves her son. Now the love between a mother and child is one of the most pure and beautiful things in the world, but this woman made her love for her child into a god. This love, that was supposed to be beautiful, became the woman’s ruin. She took the gift God gave her and put it in the place of God. This prevented her from entering heaven. The love, that was given to be the most spectacular gift, was so distorted that it ended up not only making her life miserable, but also prevented her from entering heaven. She tried to shove something that was not God into God’s slot. God’s gifts cannot replace God. Creations cannot take the place of the Creator.
There are many vices, activities and objects in our lives that obviously take the place of God. When someone has an addiction, be it to drugs, alcohol, or pornography, we see it as something that clearly is taking the place of God in that person’s life. But, often, we try to place even good things in God’s place; things like family, friends, our jobs, and our hobbies. We know that something doesn’t fit, but because we don’t understand why, we often continue through life trying to get along. Yet, no matter how good, or how bad, that thing we are try to fit into God’s place, it is never going to work. We are pounding the star into the circle’s place.
We need God. You can try to fill your life with other things, but at the end of the day you are still empty. When we don’t put God where He belongs, everything else ends up out of place. Even good things can lose their goodness, for nothing can be good without God. The creations are worthless without the Creator. We are like machines that run on God; we will never be able to run correctly without him.
In Ecclesiastics 1:2-11, Qoheleth, the author, says, “All things are vanity… One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays. The sun rises and the sun goes down… All rivers go into the sea, yet never does the sea become full… What has been will be; what has been done, that will be done…” This might seem rather depressing. But the truth is, everything would be worthless without God. He holds it all together; His gift of heaven is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. When people start feeling hopelessly lost, it is only because they have lost their focus of the ultimate goal. C.S. Lewis said, “God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
People who drive often have to learn the hard way that, when you take your eyes off the road, you can easily end up in a different place than you originally set out for. If we distract ourselves, we end up forgetting where we are going, and when we lose sight of our ultimate destination in heaven, we slowly lose ourselves. Like an inventor knows his invention, so much more does God know the person He created. We can never know ourselves outside of Him. Just as we had to learn that a star could not go into the circle’s place, we all need to realize that nothing can fill God’s place as the center of our lives.
