Hungry for the Really Real

I'm feeling today especially hungry and worn out. I plow through so many competing thoughts in any given day. They're not "bad" or necessarily "lustful" or anything like that, just competing, rival thoughts. And in that regard, they are "bad". It's like I spread wide my sheets for the whores of vain imagination. I'll start thinking of how I feel about this person or what I think this person feels of me. I'll start fantasizing of what I'll say in this situation or how I'll act there. It's all surface. It's all less than God.

I don't know exactly how to eliminate those things in this day. This morning I asked in desperation for God to simply break me, to peel me away, no matter how painfully, from these things that I'm inundated with and always eventually give myself over to, in one form or another. I keep repeating, so that maybe this will become real for me, that "brokenness is knowing God is all I have, hope is knowing that He is all I need, joy is knowing that He is all I want." There's busyness of body and there's busyness of heart. It's the distraction and diversion of the latter that wears me out, disconnects me somehow in a profound way from the Fount, and leaves me flopping around like a wet fish in the cold air - gasping and hopelessly dependent upon Someone to rescue me.

I forget things, like those citizens of Macondo in "100 Years of Solitude" forgot even that God existed and had to paint a large sign to the entrance of the village stating simply, "God Exists." It's not facts so much that I forget, but just these deeper Truths, like who I am, really; that there is a Really Real, a Reality, and that it is expressed in the face and life and death and rebirth of Jesus, the Image of the Invisible God; and that this Image is the One who made me and the One for whom I am made; and that, finally, there is this precious fellowship - bold, good, true, given as a gift but a desperately needed one, like soup for a starving vagrant, a fellowship that loves because the One who is Love abides within and who fights with violence and force because they are the offspring of the Lion of Judah. Everything else is illusion.

Why, then, does everything else feel weightier than these?