The training of doctors is centered on learning how to meet patient needs. This looks different in each case. For some, emergency care is needed. For others, it is pain management or disease control. Still for others, it is guidance and encouragement to make lifestyle changes.

As naturopathic doctors who treat holistically, we are called to a higher degree of meeting our patient’s needs. In addition to biological parameters, our care also involves teaching healthy ways to manage stress, and how to psychologically deal with the complex pressures of life that everyone faces.

But it’s not difficult to ascertain that our needs go beyond the biological and psychological. Most days, I am grateful and humbled to say that my biological and psychological needs are met. And yet, on these days, I don’t necessarily feel I am whole. All needs can be met, and something remains lacking.

There must be another need. What is it? I would say mine is to know and be known. I would also doubt I am unique. The need is written on my heart. Deep down, beyond the biological laws of nature, far deeper than my need for sleep, food, and even social acceptance, is a need that no diet, botanical supplement or familial relationship can fill.

Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician in the 1600s, captured it this way: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man, which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by the Creator.”

He was alluding to the same longing that King David pined for in 1000 B.C. when he exclaimed “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).

David, in his famous poetic lamentations, was crying out for the aching hole to be filled.

So often, we try to fill the hole with band-aids. My first resorts typically involve Netflix and mindless online shopping, but for everyone it looks different. Some try to fill with alcohol, others with work, food or entertainment. Certain habits may have larger repercussions than others, but it’s all the same: a way to numb the void.

Even (or rather, especially) the pursuit of love can be a most deceitful band-aid. Our culture is obsessed with promoting the notion that a romantic relationship will completely satisfy us. But as C.S. Lewis noted, “love ceases to be a demon, only when it ceases to be a god.”

It is apt that our campus clinic is called the “Whole Health Clinic.” As humans, we are meant to live a life of complete integrity, which comes from the root word integer, meaning whole.

The only way to be whole is to fill the hole. No adjustment, relationship, tincture or treatment can. It must be filled with the only balm that uniquely and precisely completes it.

As a Christian, I believe in a living, loving God. One who not only wants our glory, but who yearns to have a personal, intimate relationship with us. We are created to know and be known first and foremost, by him.

Our human relationships, especially that of a spouse, are a representation of this type of covenant love during our lives. But it is not the same.

Nothing on earth can fill the hole except vertical love alone. As Dr. Tim Keller said, receiving this love is the only thing that “liberates us from our pretense, humbles us out of self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”

The most beautiful part is that the healing balm for which we yearn also yearns for us, as displayed by the greatest act of sacrificial love in history.

How wonderful it is that we can turn our hearts, and corresponding lives, to accept the invitation we yearn for more than anything else in this world and receive the true wholeness for which we were made.

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Interested in naturopathic medicine as a future career? Discover more about NUHS’ Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine degree here.