Searching for Soul      | page 1 of 5 | next>

by Lynne Hybels

In my early forties I experienced a crisis of faith. For years I’d felt like I was just going through the motions of life.  On the surface I was a good wife, good mother, good Christian, but there was something missing.  That “something missing” left a hole in the thin membrane holding me together.  Energy, vitality, passion slowly seeped out, and I moved gradually from exhaustion to emptiness to despair.  I eventually sought help and healing from a Christian therapist who helped me understand certain emotional and relational dynamics that had contributed to the pain in my life.  But there was still that “something missing,” still that steady leak.  And I sensed it had something to do with God.    

The Christianity I grew up in was about doing, acting, performing, working, being effective, knowing the rules, doing the right things.  The emphasis was on productivity and efficiency and practicality.  It was about being a soldier and an athlete and attacking the work of the Kingdom. 

Those are good, biblical things.  They’re legitimate dimensions of God’s calling on our lives.  God wants to use us to help transform this broken world, and that demands our diligence and discipline.

But the longer I journeyed on the healing pathway the more I longed for something besides diligence and discipline—in every dimension of life.  I longed for something softer, gentler.  I craved beauty—art and music and fragrant teas.  And intimacy—in human conversation and in prayer.  I wanted to be known and loved for more than how I performed.  I wanted to lean into a space where sometimes it was okay to simply be.  To slow down.  To rest.  And I wanted to feel deeply.  To laugh heartily and weep freely.  I wanted a more…soulful…life.

I don’t know how to define soulfulness.  You know it when you hear it in music; when something moves you deeply, you say it “touched my soul.”  When a person probes gently into the secrets of our lives and helps us sink beneath our carefully crafted image we say we connected at a soul level. 

Alan Jones describes soul as “the metaphor for the meeting place between body and spirit.” I like that.  Soul is the part of us we can’t see mingled with what we can see.  It’s the totality of who we are, the truest place in us.  Or something like that.  At any rate, soul is good.  Dallas Willard says it’s “the deepest level of life and power in the human being.”  Soul is lively and passionate and colorful and deep and beautiful.  When we feed soul, we come to life ourselves and we give life to others.  When we dishonor soul, we choke. 

I think that much of the weariness, loneliness and emptiness that many of us feel comes from living in a world—and all too often in a church—that largely ignores the deep needs of our souls. 

We’re soul-weary. 

And so I had a crisis of faith, for there was nothing soulful in Christianity as I had known it.  There was no place in Christianity to rest, to be. There was nothing in Christianity that awakened me, touched me, filled me, satisfied my desire for intimacy, for connection.

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