Longing

I urge you to do nothing. I literally plead with you to sit and do nothing for a long long time and try really hard to feel and listen to yourself. I think maybe one of the most important parts of a journey with Christ is facing our longing. Now this entire semester has been the saddest and the best most beautiful months of my life and it has been a time of unearthing longing. Deep within us, the deepest most intimate part of us, is a longing that is unsatisfied. And I think maybe the entirety of our lives is trying to satisfy that longing and pretty quickly running from it and hiding it and burying it. And everything in the world offers a cure to longing. But Jesus does not. Because he knows that longing is not something that can ever, ever go away in our lives here. And so when we come, consumed by longing to God, he does not say, like everyone and everything else, "no, thats just a figment of your imagination. Thats not real or true." He also does not say "Yes, that will go away with more. If you just get a better job or a better spouse or better kids or better pills or better body or better grades or write a better book or more friends that will go away." I think maybe this is what he says:

"Yes. Yes, love, I know. I know you're experiencing this gut wrenching, terrifying longing. I knjow it full well. And it will not be satisfied by any of those things." (Noe, this i sa really scary moment because we were hoping he'd say that something would make it go away) "I designed you with that. I designed you for affliction because I am the God of all comfort. I came, dawned flesh and came, so that we could suffer through longing together. Because if there was no longing, there would be nothing to suggest there is anything beyond this present life. And though that would provide comfort for now, that would be the most tragic thing in the world. There is hope in something beyond you. There is longing to remind you that there is something better. Something yet to come." 

Gerald May said that the secret to falling in love with life is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to love our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter spaciousness of our emptiness rather than trying to fill it up. 

And the best feeling in the entire world, really it is the best, my heart aches so hard for you to know this for yourself, is to be brought low, lower than you ever wanted to go, and realize that you are nothing. I hate discovering that I am nothing, that no one needs me, that there is nothing I need to do, that all my busyness, no matter what kind of busyness it is is ALWAYS just me running from longing and trying to hold on to my own significance. But when you enter that dark place, the God of all comfort is waiting. And then you discover the cloud of witnesses, the Pauls and the saints and christ-lovers that have come before who know it as well. And the Word becomes alive because you're there with paul as he writes, and its both of us at once and there.And jesus is so so so much better when you actually need him. 

It is not possible to share in the comfort of Chirst without sharing in the sufferings of Christ. And the sufferings of Christ is the terrible sense of separation from God. It is the darkest part of human existence. We have ripped ourselves away from the One we were woven into. But until we enter into that truth we won't know the hope, the life that comes with it. 

We all know that inward uneasiness that there is a  way of life vastly richer and deeper than this hurried existence, but instead of embracing it and seeking it, we try to shove down the uneasiness with a multitude of temporary fixes, trying to slap on enough bandaids when the problem is cancer of the soul. 

Its one of those days where its so big in my heart, this moment seems so monumental and my eyes are welled with tears and my heart is swollen and God is lovely and I can't express it and its the worst. These words aren't adequate. Its too big for words, for any expression I could offer. Its a soul thing, you know? But it all comes back to the truth that my words are nothing, but God and His Word is absolutely everything. Let him whisper these deep truths into your soul. he will. Draw near. Do nothing, be nothing. Cry. Its okay. He loves. Oh, how he loves.