Irresponsibility Suits Me (part 3)

I don't really know if everyone gets to a point in their life where they begin to wonder if they are doing life right, but it happened to me as I sat alone in a farmhouse.  Carrie and I had just moved close to her job as a teacher in Littlefield, TX.  We rented a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.  Our closest neighbor was half a mile down a dirt road.  Our second closest neighbor was over a mile away.  I had attempted to find a job in Littlefield with no luck.  Questions began to creep into my mind and then they began to become the central focus of my attention.  What is the meaning of life,?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  And, so there I was sitting in the farmhouse wondering how long this particular chapter would last.  The answer was nine months.  That's how long it took for me to find a job in Lubbock, TX.

Working in Lubbock was exciting.  This bustling city of 200,000 people was six times larger than any place I had lived since the age of five. We moved to a house  (OK shack) on a lake just outside of town.  We spent lots of time money (and beer) really fixing the place up, and if I might say so myself it turned out to be a really nice place to relax.  I opened a homebrew supply shop and met lots of friends who loved to brew and drink beer like me.  For the next three years life was good again (by worldly definitions).  Carrie was making a good living.  Our house on the lake was paid for and we had little debt.  I was hanging out with my friends getting paid to drink beer and pretty soon those troubling questions went away.  I owned and operated Lubbock Homebere Supply for three years, and for most of that time I really had fun.

You can only push back so much against those nagging meaning of life questions.  It was like something or someone was gently asking me if I was satisfied with what my life represented.  The answer kept coming back.  There has to be more to life than seeking continuous hedonistic enjoyment.
Perhaps I think too much, or perhaps I am just like everyone else, perhaps someone has placed a void or vacuum in our heart that can only be filled with the divine.  I'm not saying that everyone must eventually fill this hole, but I am saying that it must be filled in order for one to feel whole.  So after many years of putting it off, I finally decided to ask Christ to come fill my hole, and He did. 

I didn't become a completely different person overnight however the process had begun.  I can trace it back to a bright sunny morning in April of 1996.