Soul Cravings: An Exploration of the Human Spirit

by Erwin Raphael McManus

Bottom line: we cannot live the life of our dreams without an irrational sense of destiny. And all of us have dreams. More than that, all of us need dreams. Some of us sadly are just sleeping through them. ALL OF US LONG TO BECOME SOMETHING MORE THAN WE are. We are driven to achieve, moved to accomplish, fueled by ambition. It burns hotter in some than in others, but it is within all of us. We’re all searching for our unique purpose, our divine destiny, or simply a sense of significance or some measure of success. When we are optimistic about the future, we find the energy to create it.

There is something inside us that drives us. Call it ambition, passion, rebellion, competition, independence, whatever—it manifests itself in different ways, but it’s in there from the very beginning. The human spirit longs to become. “Become what?” you ask. It hardly seems to matter. We are motivated by an endless number of things, but they’re always big. We humans are dreamers. We don’t so much grow into this as much as it’s a factory defect. In fact, when we’re young and less grounded in reality, we dream bigger and more ridiculous dreams. Our ambitions and aspirations can be absolutely out of control when we’re eight years old. We’re like young Leo in the Oscar-dominating film Titanic, standing on the bow of the ship, shouting for all creation to hear, “I’m the king of the world.” He wasn’t, you know. Though we seem to get it in different measures and intensities, all of us long to become. We are born with an instinct for not only survival but also accomplishment. There is a fire inside every one of us that propels us forward. We are designed to learn, to adapt, to grow, to change, to develop, to progress, to become. Especially when we are children, we have endless energy that fuels play, curiosity, and imagination. From childhood we naturally move toward the future. George Bernard Shaw lamented that imagination was wasted on the young; Einstein, on the other hand, attributed the key to his genius as never losing his childhood curiosity. As we grow, these intensify int...

Our intrinsic need for progress can be seen from our earliest dreams and childhood longings. We humans are instinctively ambitious. When we dream, our dreams naturally gravitate toward greatness. No one ever dreams of becoming an Olympic swimmer who, after years of hard work and personal sacrifice, manages to come in fourth. Can you imagine a ten-year-old swimmer passionately describing to you how she is working toward the Olympic Games and her ambition is to finish just one place short of a medal? The dream that drives her is to know that she is in the same water with the very best in the world. Walk the streets of Brooklyn. Interview those kids playing ball until the dark of night. Ask them what they want to do when they grow up. They’ll tell you they want to play in the NBA; they want to be the next Michael Jordan. Not one of them will get misty-eyed, look off in the distance, and say, “I want to be just good enough where I can ride the pine for the last place team in the NBA.” What’s really strange about this phenomenon is that if we were brutally honest, most of those kids don’t have what it takes to make it as an Olympic swimmer or a professional basketball player. If they could just get a contract to sit on the bench or ever manage to even qualify for the Olympic Games, it would be nothing short of a miracle. For most of us, coming in last among the best would be a farfetched dream, yet we don’t dream like this.

As children we assume that greatness is within our grasp. Whatever inspires us, we begin to dream that one day we will be the best. It is only as we lose our childlike innocence that we begin to settle for far less. A part of growing up seems to be acquiescing to mediocrity. It’s easy to say that we’re just becoming realistic, that it’s just a part of growing up. But, in fact, it’s the death of our souls. When we stop dreaming, we start dying. For some of us, this has been a slow, painful death. Others are just walking dead. They died a long time ago, and it’s nothing less than a freak of nature that they’re still breathing.

He was five years old when he knew that someday he would fly. In the late 1960s his parents took him to the Portland airport to watch planes take off and land. As a child he enjoyed watching the cadre of Boeing 707s and 727s and McDonnell Douglas DC-8s land and take off. It was there that his dream was born. This, he felt, was his destiny. His mother, of course, struggled with how she was going to tell him that this would not be possible. It turns out, she never had to, which is where the bumblebee effect comes in. Randy explained that by all theories of aerodynamics and physics, the bumblebee should not be able to fly, but it can. No scientific reason why it should; it just does. I guess no one bothered to tell it that flying wasn’t possible. There were many people along the way who told Randy that his dream to fly would never come to fruition. He was told again and again it was impossible, but somehow in his gut he knew it wasn’t true. There were glimpses of hope along the way. Another person of short stature had done it, and prosthetic devices were being developed for people with missing limbs. In 1989, finally a flight instructor named Bob Wallace took him on as a student, and Randy began preparing for takeoff. A year later, after several trials and revisions of adaptive equipment and a demonstration of his ability to an FAA examiner, Randy went solo.

On April 15, 1998, Randy purchased a 1968 Cessna 150 and started flying for a nonprofit organization called Challenge Air for Kids and Friends, an organization that gives plane rides to children who are either disabled or in some way disadvantaged. The bumblebee effect had gone full circle. But really it went much deeper than this. Randy was born with a genetically inherited bone dysplasia called diastrophic dwarfism. This disorder is characterized by very short limbs and a number of other orthopedic and cartilage defects. Imagine being forty-three years old and barely standing forty-five inches. Beyond his physical challenges, Randy was not expected to survive too far beyond birth, much less into adulthood. We live in a time when, given the information of Randy’s condition, many would choose to terminate the pregnancy. The argument, of course, would be about the quality of life. What kind of life could you expect for someone who was born with such an extraordinary disadvantage? Would it be fair to bring someone into the world when he would so quickly leave it? Yet four decades later, Randy is a walking reminder that the future often holds far more than we can imagine. He holds a degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State University and for the last twenty years has been working to write software that automates chemical plants.

With all that Randy had overcome, there were still many other struggles and challenges that he had to face. When he found himself reaching the age of forty, he began to wonder if he had a future worth living for. He had never been married and wondered if he would ever know love. He knew his stature came into play and questioned why God would ever do this to him. He found himself struggling with addictions. As he describes it: “I became a lost soul.” I was struck that while his physical challenges were very different from most of ours, his internal struggles were very much the same. He longed to be loved. He was trying to make sense of his life. He needed to know whether his life had a purpose or whether his entire struggle was for nothing. Are we nothing more than biological anomalies? Are we simply the product of chance—the result of bad luck? Is our existence just an accident, or is there a reason for our being? There is a difference between being unusual and being unique. Randy knew he was different, but more than that he somehow knew he was destined to soar.

It’s amazing how much we can endure when we are convinced there is a purpose to our struggle. It was while Randy was in Washington State that he came to grips with his need for God. He found God while searching for his destiny.

Before I met Randy, I was well acquainted with the butterfly effect, but it took Randy to bring me face-to-face with the bumblebee effect. The butterfly effect proposes that small and apparently insignificant incidents can set in motion a chain of events with far-reaching consequences. The bumblebee effect describes how great and apparently impossible dreams can set in motion a chain of events resulting in a seemingly insignificant person living an extraordinary life. We are capable of far more than we think.

We may not be able to accomplish everything we can dream, but we will not accomplish anything without our dreams. That’s not to say that things don’t happen beyond our wildest dreams, but that effect seems to come into play only when we are actually pursuing wild dreams.

We dream of a destiny, and it fuels our desire. When we dwell on the past, we tend to want to live there. When we dream of the future, we want to go there. Our dreams are where God paints a picture of a life waiting to be created. Dreams are God’s way of fueling the future, and in this we are all the same. All of us need to believe in tomorrow. When we live without dreams, we are functionally dysfunctional. We have given up on the creative process. We have abdicated responsibility for our own future to chance or fate or something else . . . A life in God is never absent of dreams. God designed us to dream because he created us to create. We are made to be actively involved in the process of creating the future. The future doesn’t just happen; it is ushered in. Our need for progress is all around us. It’s probably screaming at you, but maybe you just haven’t noticed.

and I saw the name of the manufacturer of this instrument of torment. Guess what the name is? It’s “Thinner.” If we’re looking for accuracy in advertising, shouldn’t anyone who makes scales be called “Thicker” or “Futile”? Oh, but the marketing gurus were way too smart for that. You could just hear them plotting, “We’ve got to keep them believing that they can make progress. First they get the bad news, and then they’ll unconsciously drop their heads in despair and see our name. It will be more than a name; it will be a sign to them, a voice of hope. You can be . . . you will be thinner.” (We just ordered pizza.)

😃😃😂

It is God who has placed within you the fuel of ambition. You cannot live the life God created you to live without being ambitious. The reason your heart leaps when you see greatness is that your spirit is drawn to it. The reason we can experience the vicarious exhilaration of a great victory or an amazing accomplishment is that the human spirit resonates with greatness. While many of us have come to believe ambition is unhealthy, the truth is when you lose ambition, you lose your future. When you lose your future, you lose hope. And no one can live well without hope. Without ambition we have no dreams worth living. When we let our dreams die, we start dying with them. Every human being has a need for progress. This is not accidental. God created us with an intrinsic need to become. We are connected not only to the past and the present, but also to the future. There is a reason why you have a sense of destiny. It was placed there by God, and it woos you to pursue it.

IT IS IMPORTANT TO FULLY LIVE EACH MOMENT, BUT EQUALLY important to make sure that we do not live only for this moment. If we don’t believe in an afterlife, we try to find purpose in the here and now. Yet we can do this only if we at least believe in the “after now.” We have to believe in tomorrow to function well today. It will never be enough for us simply to exist, and if all we have is now, our souls will starve from lack of nourishment. Without a future there is no hope, and hope is essential for our souls to thrive. Hope exists only in the future, and if the future does not exist, there is no hope. Our minds can work out an endless number of scenarios; our souls, however, are quite inflexible when it comes to this. Without hope there is only despair. A sense of destiny is what you begin to experience when you are filled with hope. Every one of us is on a search for destiny. We all need to believe we have a future and a hope. These two are impossible to separate. If you don’t believe you have a future worth living for, your spirit loses all hope, and your soul was not designed to live without hope. In fact, when we lose all hope, we lose all desire to live. Hope moves us from pessimism to optimism.

It is impossible to get into the heart and mind of a person who has chosen to take his or her life. As if suicide were not tragic enough, sometimes it seems the scenarios around stories make it even worse. Over the years I’ve had many friends struggle with thoughts of suicide. For some people, the contrast between the life they have and the life they long for is more than they can bear. What has struck me, though, is how little it sometimes takes for a person to change his or her mind. You would think something as final as deciding to commit suicide would take some life-shaking event to circumvent it. I haven’t found that always to be the case. I knew a young woman who decided to take her life that day at work. She was walking to the window in the high-rise building where the company’s offices were, and just before she walked out to the ledge, someone walked through the hall and asked her if she knew where the Coke machine was. It was just enough that day. Instead of pointing the way to the machine, she showed the person the way. She said it gave her something to do, something that needed to be done by her, a reason to live. Anna, on the other hand, was a dancer in Los Angeles who had grown up in a world of divorce, drug abuse, and homelessness. Barely out of her teens, she couldn’t see herself making it through one more day. She went to an infamous spot in Pasadena called “suicide bridge.” It was there that she decided to bring her story to an end. She couldn’t think of o...

WHEN THERE IS NO FUTURE, THERE IS NO HOPE. WHERE there is no hope, there is no reason to live. There is only despair. Our souls are not designed for despair. It’s not where we are intended to live. If we live there too long, we will find ourselves soul–sick.

The maddening reality is that each and every one of us has been created with a soul craving to become—to become something—something better, something different, something special, something unique, something admired, something valued, something more than we are.

At the same time, we are faced with the reality of our own mortality. We are pulled by both eternity and brevity. We act as if we will live forever and are constantly facing the painful truth that life can end at any moment.

For my son, Aaron’s, seventeenth birthday, I bought him that poster of his favorite icon, James Dean. I’m pretty sure it’s because James Dean reminds him so much of me. Underneath a black-and-white photograph of what my daughter, Mariah, has determined is a picture of human perfection, these words are written: “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” Dean’s...

We are all chasing daylight. Our lives are but a brief moment in time. Blink and it’s gone. As soon as we are fully aware of life, we become fully aware of death. The more moments we live, the faster they speed past us. And if this life is all there is, the more we make of this life, the more we have to lose when we leave it. The fact that we’re all time-dated should lead us nowhere but to desperation. We are all running out of time. If that isn...

A friend of mine introduced me to a classic foreign film a few years ago. It has become one of my favorites. It’s called Chungking Express. In one of the subplots, a man scorned by love concludes that everything has an expiration date. Tomatoes, milk, eggs, film, pills, passports, faith, hope, love—everything has an expiration date, or at least so it seems. You don’t have to search far for people who thought love would last forever and watched it fall apart right before their eyes. I have also seen in life that many who are most antagonistic against the idea of faith had at one time been the most sincere of the faithful. When milk hits its expiration date, it turns sour, but when we come to the end of hope, it’s our souls that ...

Earlier I mentioned one of my favorite people and speakers Chip Anderson. Chip had a Ph.D. in education and for years taught at UCLA. Through his work in educational psychology, he had become the father of strengths-based education. Over three thousand people at Mosaic in Los Angeles have discovered their strengths as a result of Chip’s investment in our lives. One of his extraordinary talents was seeing the best in people. He spent his whole life calling out greatness in others and applauding it, even when he saw it expressed in the smallest of ways. The last time he spoke to our community here in Los Angeles, the title of his talk was simply “It’s All About the Dash.” Take a few minutes sometime and find your nearest cemetery. Walk through the memorials there representing the lives of a countless number of people who lived before you. You will see different dates of birth and times of death, but they all will hav...

Even the smallest of dreams will keep us moving forward. It doesn’t even need to be rooted in reality; just our belief that we can get there keeps us inspired. But when we give up hope, when we allow ourselves to internalize despair, we shut down. We simply give up trying. Despair not only takes us to the wrong place, but it keeps us from going forward.

You were not created to run from challenges, to live in angst, or to drown in despair. This is not a good place for your soul. You also can’t move forward into your future when you are paralyzed by fear.

Over the years I’ve heard many people condescendingly describe faith as the activity of the weak. Is it possible that the reason we find God in our deepest despair is that this is when we are most earnestly listening? The word despair means “to live apart from hope.” It can then also be translated “to live without a future.” No one knows better than God that we cannot live like this. Despair is to the soul what toxic waste is to the body. Overexposure is lethal. When we find ourselves hiding in a cave, we should not be surprised tha...

YEARS AGO I WAS INTRODUCED TO THE WRITINGS OF Viktor Frankl. Frankl, who lived during World War II, was one of the many Jews who endured the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and one of the few who survived. I have been deeply affected on both personal and professional levels by the insights he gained through his struggle. His most famous book was originally titled From Death-Camp to Existentialism. It was first published in Austria in 1946. I am indebted to him for the lessons he learned through the brutality of Nazi oppression. While his writings are rich with insight, one observation stands as paramount:

Hope is essential for life.

Frankl makes a powerful observation that those who still believed they had something yet to accomplish, something that required them to exist in the future, found the strength to endure what those who had lost all hope could not: “Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.” Frankl goes on to explain in addressing the issue of despair, “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had ...

Ironically Frankl’s most powerful insight was most likely inspired, or at least informed, by Nietzsche’s observation, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Frankl’s writings became an introduction to his development of logotherapy, and from that his book was retitled Man’s Search for Meaning. But I think rather than moving his fellow prisoners toward meaning, he instead took them past meaning to purpose. Their despair was overcome not by making sense of life, but by believing in the future. After all, how could you have made sense of their lives? How do you make sense of the fact that on a beautiful Monday afternoon you and your family are ripped out of your home, stripped of all that you’ve worked for, thrown into a train, and placed within a concent...

Their resolve and resilience to endure the unimaginable came out of souls that believed that their destiny could not be ...

This is true for all of us, and it affects us on both ends of the life spectrum. A sense of destiny gives us the strength to face overwhelming obstacles and hardships. At the same time living a life with a powerful sense of purpose gives us the energy and enthusiasm to get up in the morning and face the day. It is in the worst of situations that we are able to discover the best in us. It is also in these moments ...

Several years ago a young filmmaker came by my office eagerly wanting to show me a private screening of his film. The story was about a couple of angels struggling with right and wrong. One chose the path of good and remained an angel; the other chose a dark path, and as his punishment, he became a human. It was beautifully shot; it was visually stunning; even the story was captivating. But his view of what it means to be human was tragic. Being human was a punishment. Being human is what happens to fallen angels. I think more of us see humanity like this than we think. In fact, it is a gift to be human.

The Hebrew imagery is that we were created out of the breath of God. We are the products of a divine kiss. When Ezekiel the Hebrew prophet spoke of the change that was needed in the human heart, he simply said that God would take our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. In other words, all God is going to do is to make us once again truly human or maybe fully human. When we live beneath our humanity, we become inhumane. When we live genuinely human lives, we become translucent reflections of divinity.

think a lot of us turn to reincarnation in hopes that one day we might escape the curse of being human. Some of us even hope that one day humans might actually become gods. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormons, holds this as humanity’s best hope. If you are a Mormon and a man, you will become a deity like Jesus, and in some future world you will reign as a divine being. Talk about visions of grandeur! We’re back with Leonardo on the bow of the T...

The good news is that we don’t have to become gods to become something worth loving, worth respecting, worth valuing. Don’t let your shortcomings and flaws convince you that you need to become something other than human. Our brokenness is not proof that God could not or would not love us, but proof that what we need is the God who both created us and loves us. Wh...

VIKTOR FRANKL DISCOVERED THAT STRENGTH IS unleashed within us when we are convinced our lives have a purpose yet to be fulfilled. This reality is magnified when we choose a purpose beyond ourselves. When we begin to give ourselves to a cause or a purpose greater than us, it changes us; it makes us better. When we dream of a better world, we become better people. When we give ourselves for the good of the world, we find that doing so brings to us a world of good. We are not disconnected by the destiny we pursue.

Even if we never achieve our dreams, we are always shaped by those dreams, and the higher the purpose, the stronger the person.

THE LIFE THAT IS MOST POWERFULLY LIVED I S THE ONE that finds passionate urgency fueled by a sense of destiny. We must become. This is both something we need and something we long for. One of the most quoted proverbs of Solomon is that without vision the people will perish. He also said that hope deferred makes a heart sick. He seems to be telling us that we need to have a dream we are pursuing and at the same time experience enough of that dream to keep us inspired. We need both to aspire and accomplish. Without a vision for your life, without a sense of purpose, you will begin to die a slow death. At the same time, if hope seems only an illusion, if you give up on hope, your heart, your soul, will become sick. It is not only essential to keep hope alive; it is hope that keeps us alive. Hope is the fuel through which we create the future. When you give up on hope, you become paralyzed in the present and begin to live in the past. If you are not looking toward the future, you do not have one.

OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO SPEAK AT conferences on this very subject. Each time in the middle of my lecture I would ask one of the more well-known speakers to come up and help me for a minute. I would try to choose someone the people saw as a symbol of success. Someone who, in a transparent moment, the audience would confess they wanted to be like. I would begin an interview and explain that the only rules were that the person had to be honest. The dialogue would go something like this: “Elvis, it’s good to have you here today. I want to ask you a couple of personal questions. Is that all right?” “Sure, that’s fine.” “What I need from you is for you just to be perfectly honest. Okay?” “Of course. Yes.” “You’re a pretty successful guy, and everyone here admires you. A lot of people would rather spend their lives imitating you than actually finding their own unique voice.” “That’s true. Viva Las Vegas.” “Elvis, has there ever been a time when you have felt insignificant?” (Long pause.) “Yeah.” “So there’s been a moment in your life when even with all of your success, you’ve wondered if your life had any value, any real significance? In spite of all of your success, these insecurities have haunted you? In other words, you’re nothing but a hound dog?” “That’s right.” “How did you get through those moments?” Not mentioning alcohol or prescription drugs, he responds, “Love. People around me, Priscilla, you know, the people who care about me helped me through those mome...