The hollow feeling (and what Haggai says about it)

Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about this week.

What if your biggest spiritual problem right now isn’t that you’re doing something terrible - but that you’ve put something good in the wrong place?

I know. It’s not the framing we expect. We tend to imagine sin as a list of obvious things. But most of us aren’t living scandalous lives. We’re just busy. We mean to pray, but the morning disappears. We love our families, but work creeps in at the edges. We pick up our phones before we pick up anything else.

That quiet drift has a name in the Bible. And it doesn’t come from one of the famous books.

This week I’ve been in Haggai - all two chapters of it. It was written for people who were, by most measures, doing fine. They had homes, crops, wages, plans. Good, ordinary things. But God’s house was in ruins, and somehow nobody seemed particularly bothered.

God’s response wasn’t condemnation. It was closer to a gentle question: Does this actually feel like it’s working?

Augustine put it in one sentence that’s stayed with me for years: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it repose in thee.”

When something other than God sits at the centre - even something genuinely good - everything feels faintly hollow as a result.

I explore this in today’s devotional. It’s about five minutes. And it ends with just one honest question to carry through your day.

Watch here:

With you in the drift.

Rob

Read this week’s devotionals here - https://open.substack.com/pub/battledrilldevotional/p/have-you-ever-felt-like-youve-blown?r=643q6o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true