But our dual burden drives us a little crazy. We long for simplistic reassurances. We want to know that we have found a gospel that will vanquish the hard realities. To live with a promise and its contradictions is the most heroic challenge of the Christian faith.

In recent years, particularly in the West, we have drifted into a belief that we can live without this tension. We now assure ourselves that God wants us to live without the needs and realistic limitations that we admit so reluctantly. Christians, in particular, believe that they should have found the secret to living whole and fulfilling lives.

Much of the spiritual advice Christians offer to each other assumes that wholeness is God's great desire for humanity. This assumption betrays a tendency to psychologize the doctrine of redemption. Salvation thus becomes a matter of healing the hurts suffered earlier in live, and need is perceived as a flaw in the original work of God - who must have made us to be whole creatures.

Wholeness is in style. But even though the term is used constantly, it is rarely defined. Typically, Christians who talk about wholeness mean that all of the individual must come under the healing work of God. The holistic teachers want to avoid a spirituality that has no implications for the real needs of life. They are certainly to be commended for asserting that the gospel has meaning for the nitty-gritty of life. But the meaning they think it has is another matter. They are sure the gospel promises that God is working to restore us to a created condition of being complete. About that some of us have doubts. Serious doubts.

Few people claim to actually be whole, but many have committed their lives to attaining wholeness. Between their spiritual disciplines, their current psychotherapy and their commitment to heal the hurts of the past, they hope at least to move in the direction of wholeness.

The yearning for wholeness is intense today because many feel so fractured and torn. They are torn by the competing demands of work and home, of spouse and child, and of the church that keeps asking more of their time and energy. They are torn by dreams for the future that are ridiculed by failures of the past. They are torn by the longing to get life right and the nagging suspicion that they are fatally flawed, and they are torn absolutely apart by the craving to be loved and the terrified fear of being known. If only they were whole, if only they could fix all the parts of life that don't seem to work, then they would be okay.

So out of compassion, someone tells them all of it can be changed, because - and this is the seductive part - God wants to meet their needs. Out of compassion, someone unintentionally lies. The call to wholeness is being issued in the sermons, journals, workshops, and the advice industry of both conservative and liberal quarters of the church. But we don't find it in Scripture.

What we find in Scripture is the incredible promise that God has broken into our brokenness to find us there. There is no promise that, having found us, he will paste our fractured lives back together.

This doesn't mean that all of life doesn't have to be brought under the healing of God. It does. But God's healing doesn't fit exactly with our yearnings to have the pain taken away. As a church member with cancer once told me, "There is a big difference between healing and avoiding death." God's healing has more to do with learning to worship than it does with getting life fixed. What God is eager to heal is the sickness of the soul and the blindness of the heart that take us down a painful road away from his love. Worship is the means by which our eyes are opened.

In worshiping God we realize we were never created to be whole. God will not restore what we were never intended to have. What we were created to enjoy is fellowship with God, who alone is whole and complete.

Nowhere in the Bible are we told that God wants to give us wholeness. What God wants to give us is himself. If we really believed that, it would be enough. In fact, it would be more than enough. It would overwhelm us.

The effect of our fascination with wholeness is that it embarks us on a journey for which there is no end, a journey that takes us further away from God. He invites us to journey in a different direction.