Meeting Spiritual Hunger Without Wounding It

Why does the hunger for significance seem to persist across cultures and history? During my formative years, a great deal of literature was devoted to being positive and setting lifetime goals. One book I remember is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who endured Nazi concentration camps. His reflections grew out of that experience. It seems that great moments of crisis bring these questions to the surface. And as our society has slowly shifted toward a mostly secular worldview, those deeper feelings of unrest are surfacing again. The old familiar ways of making sense of things seem “off.” Where can one find hope and meaning in life?

Our common secular framework often interprets spiritual longing as an expression of our drive for coherence, purpose, and identity—especially when life feels fragile or mysterious. It may also explain the longing for community, trust, and belonging as a survival impulse that helped human groups endure. Many who hold this view acknowledge that the hunger is universal, and that religious language has been one historically powerful way of expressing it across time. Yet none of these explanations fully answers the deeper question: why are these longings within us to begin with? Our earlier Christian worldview frames this longing as something woven into humanity from the beginning—not merely a coping mechanism, but a clue to reality.

Even when we disagree with others about the specifics of spirituality and its origins, we all seem to share a sense that guilt and forgiveness, justice and hope, purpose and belonging, and awe and gratitude matter. Whether in the media or in person-to-person interactions, we often treat these as “givens.” It isn’t that we value human dignity—the question is why we do. And then, who or where do we go to discuss that and seek answers? If not institutions or charismatic leaders, then where?

Various polls and surveys in recent years suggest an increasing interest in Christ—the person. Even skeptics are often intrigued by the person of Christ and his teachings. This seems to be driven by the perception that Christ is compassionate, trustworthy, and offers a message of hope. His teachings are compelling—not like the judgmental themes they often hear. When discussing morals with others, this common interest in Christ can become a starting point for deeper conversation.

Perhaps one way to begin to understand the Christian worldview is to compare it with the moral world into which Christ arrived. Slavery and infanticide were widespread. Equality, as we tend to assume today, was not a common social ideal. You were born into one station with little hope of anything else. If you weren’t near the top of the power chain, your life carried less value in the eyes of society. The poor, the weak, and the disadvantaged were often despised or discarded. When Christ came on the scene, he not only contested that—he turned it on its head. What is one of the most recognized symbols around the world today? The cross—which in Christ’s time was so shameful that a noble Roman could hardly bear to look at it. 

If we admire moral values that often run against a purely secular “survival and self” framework, isn’t it fair to ask where those moral instincts come from? This deep longing for hope, meaning, and “the way things ought to be” seems to have an origin. We feel that some things are truly right and others truly wrong. We sense that justice matters—not just as a social preference, but as something we should pursue even when it costs us.

And yet, when we look across history and across cultures, people’s moral answers have not been identical. Even within our own society, definitions of morality and justice shift over time. Still, the longing remains. We watch outrages and feel that there should be a reckoning. We want wrongs to be named, victims to be seen, and truth to matter. The question is not simply whether we desire justice, but why we do—and where we can go to explore those questions honestly.

That brings us to something practical: where are the venues where a person can feel safe, and where trust can actually be built? I would suggest that trust must be earned, not assumed. One of the simplest ways to foster trust is to invite others into your home for a meal and unhurried conversation. The point of the conversation is not to win an argument, but to know a person—who they are, what they carry, what they desire, and what they fear. People can spot agendas a mile away. If there is going to be meaningful conversation, your interest in their life, their struggles, and their questions must be genuine.

When that kind of trust begins to grow, questions of hope and meaning can be explored together rather than debated. And then, if Christ truly embodies the moral vision we already admire—compassion, truth, dignity, sacrifice, forgiveness—perhaps he is worth a deeper look.

Small-group settings can sometimes provide that kind of safety as well. But in my experience, nothing builds trust more naturally than the table—conversation in a home, with time, attention, and sincerity.