The Longing... for which I have no subtitle

Longing: a prolonged, persistent, unfulfilled desire or need

  

"For He satisfies the longing soul, And fills the hungry soul with goodness."

Psalm 107:9

NKJV

 "Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!"
                                                           Isaiah 30:18

I don't want to beleaguer the topic...but this is yet another blog about something I don't have. So please allow me to begin with the disclaimer that God is good, and that He has dealt bountifully with me. I acknowledge, revel in, and glorify God for that. I do. But through the longings of my heart, He has taught me a little about the longings of His. That's worthy of repeating...even at the risk of sounding like a wimpy whinerson. So please read past the whiny twang of my words to see the portrait that my God is painting in my life and heart. I want you to see, because what He's spoken into my life about His love has left me stunned at its beauty.


 I've mentioned that I wanted kids. But did I say that I love them? I love kids. I love their innocence and joy and faith and unfettered perspectives. I love their frank words and trusting hearts. I love their guileless ways of showing affection and I love...I LOVE watching them grow and learn and step into their own personal walks with the Lord. I love watching them serve. I love watching the way that they know how to love.  I love learning from them. I love it.

Ironically, I actually used to be afraid of kids. mostly just the little ones, but still... I preferred the soft glow of sliders and buttons in the safety of the sound booth to the  toy minefield that is a church nursery.  A sound system might feed back at you, but you just undo whatever you did most recently, and it stops. Just like that. This trick does not generally work with people. Thankfully, by God's grace I was thrown in to children's ministry, and ultimately found myself standing in front of a crowd of  kids holding a guitar that I barely knew how to play. We talked about worship. We talked about WHO we worship, and what it can look like. We talked about why we worship and what it means in our lives. Sometimes we worshiped with music and sometimes we worshiped with our thanks and our prayers. Those  Friday nights spent at Kids' Club mark one of the richest, most cherished times in my life. And yet, every week, my most precious and painful moment would fall just after I had strapped my guitar case to my back and fished my keys out of my bag. When all of the classes had dispersed to games, snack, or Bible time I would pause in the empty hallway by the church door to listen.

It was the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. It seemed like the whole building was filled with  laughter and happy shouts and voices reading scripture and those odd snippets of conversation that you can never quite find a reasonable context for.  It brings a smile to my heart just thinking about it...a smile to my heart and tears to my eyes. I would listen as long as I could stand it, then I would load my guitar and bags into my car and drive home to my dark empty house. I could go on...I could tell more embarrassing stories,or tell about the small delights I would love to share with a child. As much as I love chaos (That wasn't meant to sound ironic) I still daydream about quiet moments of singing a small somebody to sleep or taking hold of growing hands to pray over broken hearts, hopeful futures, and that ever elusive someday.

The point is that as I have longed for children and I have longed for my husband, I've learned a few things about the gauntlet of emotions that accompany longing. I've grappled with and come into accord with hope, and I've had a taste of the joy and sorrow and endurance that love necessitates. I've become acquainted with the feelings of discouragement when the longed for thing doesn't materialize. This was perhaps aggravated by my perception that I was relatively alone in my experience. I know, right? You didn't know I was such a wimpo. Not like anybody else has had to live with the sorrow of empty arms while watching others come by their dream with apparent ease. Hannah. Sarah. Rebekah. Leah longed for her husband's affection and Rachel longed for children, each watching her sister receive the gift she longed for. I don't pretend that my experience approaches or compares to theirs. I do know that every good and precious gift comes from above. I also know that God has a personal relationship with each of His children and consequently has a completely different plan for each one of us. A person is not broken because their path or design doesn't follow the anticipated route. The uniqueness of our lives shows that God does not design tritely.

 I am thankful that God put me in the position of longing for a very specific reason. Because He longs for me. I never would have learned even a particle of what that meant had He given what I asked for years ago. But one day as I was driving, asking God why I had to live with the sorrow of longing- already loving something that wasn't there, and for what felt like such a long time,  and He gently pressed it on my heart: That's how I long for you.  I was simultaneously blessed and broken. There He was. Perfect. Beautiful. Loving me. Waiting for me...and I hadn't given Him the fullness of my own heart. I had let Him stand by, Faithful, while I cried out about a man who wouldn't come and children I couldn't see. Call me Gomer. Call me wretched. Call me ungrateful. I love God. I love Him, and it broke my heart to realize that I had waved Him aside and dismissed the significance of His love, which I could see in a whole new light. I marvelled at the new depth of love He was showing me. He longed for me. He lived His whole 33 years on Earth with the purpose of winning His Bride, and He never faltered in His faithfulness. I don't know that anybody has ever longed for me before. And here was the Ultimate Somebody, offering His blood and His love to cover me, wanting to walk with me and be my most precious companion. I felt humbled and treasured at the same time. Had God given me everything I asked for, back when I had asked the first time, I never would have grasped (especially within my very  human understanding) the significance of longing. I would have heard the words and thought "God wants to be with me." And it would have been true. But now I see the richness and the weight of longing, and I know that because Jesus longs for me, I must give myself to Him. Because He longs for His church, I must do everything in my power to lead others to Him. I'm thankful for the years of longing behind me, and less afraid of the ones before me, because He has shown me His love.

The Hope (In which I use far too many fragments. I'm not sorry.)

 A friend and I were recently talking about hope. Not in the normal "Isn't hope great?" way...really more in a desperate, hurt, "why is it so hard?" kind of way. Finally, staring at the floor, almost afraid to say it out loud, I let out the words I’d been thinking for some time. “Sometimes hope just feels…brutal.” I meant it. I really meant it. Did Solomon say hope deferred made the heart sick? Yeah…if by sick he meant pulverized. Obliterated. Exhausted. Taunted. Have I scandalized you yet? Hopefully, dear reader, you've already identified the problem...we were not talking about Jesus, nor were we talking about salvation and the hope of seeing heaven. We were talking about husbands and marriage. Well... we were griping. About Proverbs 13:12. 

 I'm reluctant to pinpoint the source of my sorrow because (1) it makes me feel mildly pathetic, and (2) I didn't want the specifics of my situation to become the topic of conversation. However, in order to understand where I was coming from, you might as well know. I’m not married. In fact, the last time I intentionally went on a date was…a really long time ago. And the invitation started with “you’re the only girl I know around here, so…” Details like this didn’t seem appropriate for the writer profile section of my blog, so I might as well go on to tell you that I’m childless, single and just slightly over the typical marrying age. At least so far as the American Christian sub-culture is concerned.  That sub-culture seems to gauge eligibility and parenthood in a conversion scale strikingly similar to dog years. Many of my friends got married when they were 19 or 20 and are now blessed with beautiful children that fill their homes with precious laughter and the sort of chaos I used to dream of. I wanted a passel of kids to fill my life with adventures and a husband that I could come alongside of and serve God with. I still do. But God is leading my heart to see that the gifts that He has given me are precious as well.

I know that we all have things we hope for. We hope for healing. We hope for pain to stop. We hope for happy things to start, and we hope a thousand things a day to that end. I spent my adolescence reading novels and attending studies, seminars, and camps that encouraged the practice of purity in consideration of the marriage we would someday have. So, as a teen I started investing in my marriage. Saving thoughts, experiences, and adventures to share with the husband that I knew God would bring one day. Years down the road, I was still alone. Wallowing. Because God hadn't given me what He'd given seemingly everybody around me. I'd spent all that time storing up the riches of my heart (poor as they are) for a hero that didn't appear. There was no precious heart to cherish and no heart waiting for me to trust with my own. I'm not generally mushy, but I think its necessary to communicate how extensively hope- hope for something precious and holy and pure, had left me sorrowful, hurt, and disheartened.

That's a pretty big problem. Hope hurt. I didn’t want it anymore. But I know my God. I know His love, and I know that He would never tell me to hope when He really meant despair. Determined to have it out with the problem of hope, I hit the Word. True, there were instances of hope being mentioned in a sorrowful or painful light, but those were largely from Job. And Solomon. That should have been my first hint. I kept on, looking up instance after instance of "hope" in Scripture. At first I found myself throwing back indignant answers to the verses I came upon, but as my Beloved continued to wash my heart with water through the Word, I felt myself soften towards Him.

  I felt like the sun had risen in my heart. Scripture after Scripture reminded me that Jesus, my Precious Redeemer, my Companion and Mighty Warrior; He is my hope. He is the promise. My hope was defeated because it was deferred- misplaced in something human. Not even something human- something potentially human that might someday materialize.  I wanted a good thing. But my desire was inferior to my Savior and His plan...whatever it is for me. He has given me His very self and promised me a life together with Him.That's pretty significant. When I think of hope in the light of His gift, I can see that true hope is given by Him as much as it is defined by Him.

 Romans 5:5, Titus 2:13, Ephesians 4:4, Psalm 71:5, 1 Timothy 1:1

Prolegomena: In which I prepare to bare my soul

Prolegomena: (plural) Introductory remarks to an essay or argument; preliminary discussion; from the Greek "prolegein" pro: before  legein:to speak; literally "Before I speak"

It's my understanding that most blogs begin with an introductory blog or explanation of the blogger's reasons for writing whatever it is that they're about to write. This is mine. I'll begin with the title.
I'm Song. It's my name...one of them. Like everybody, I have sorrows, aches, angers, and longings that I don't necessarily broadcast to the general public. In recent years, God has been using some of these instances to minister amazing, precious things to my heart. However, thinking that I was largely alone in the need for these lessons, I didn't feel compelled to share too widely what I was learning. I was wrong. I was wrong because when God shares something precious with me, I should want other people to know it. Over the past year, God has laid it on my heart to start sharing these things. So, tentatively, I started talking... baring my soul. I learned a variety of things.
1. I am certainly NOT the only person thinking those thoughts, feeling those hurts, or hoping against any shred of reasonable hope.
2. Life is a lot easier when people know how to pray for you specifically.
3. My attitude about not sharing was limiting me. Limiting my conversations with my sisters in Christ and limiting how vulnerable and open I was willing to be in my relationship with my Savior....I was limiting my intimacy with God by not acknowledging what He was doing. It was NOT alright. Luckily- no, amazingly- miraculously, I have a God who cares too much about me to let me tritely limit my relationship with Him that way. So, HE starting talking.

 About two months ago, no matter where I turned in my Bible- be it in my devotions, a study, or a passing conversation with a friend, God laid the same thing on my heart. It was like every verse was saying the same thing. Basically it boiled down to 1 Corinthians 16:14. Be brave. Be Strong. Let all that you do be done in love. It made me nervous. I didn't want to have a reason for being brave. I just wanted to be...taken care of. Safe.

Don't get me wrong, I got saved when I was a wee thing and have been living with Christ in my heart somewhere around 24 years now. I love how exhilierating and free the Christian walk is. I'm passionate about Jesus. My relationship with Him is the thing that defines every other part of my life. I've lived with Him and loved Him and watched Him work miracles in my heart and life. But He wants more. He wants to be closer. He's calling me to draw near, and He's doing it so specifically and tenderly that pretending like I don't hear is no longer an option... if it ever was. He's giving me a chance to glorify Him in a new way. To speak out the huge, beyond me miracles that He's been working under the surface- those insurmountable heart things that could simmer away unnoticed if He were inclined to let them. Which He hasn't. While He is the proprieter and possessor of my heart, it is only He and I that know what He does there...unless one of us chooses to share. He's wrought victories and conquered fear and shown me amazing things and I want everybody to know how great He is. I want to tell the Mighty works that My God- Jehovah Rapha has done in me.  As the sole spectator of His hand on my heart, mine is the  voice that can tell of those specific whispers and lessons. So I will. Here. The words I've trembled to speak, the lessons I didn't want anybody to know I required, I intend to let loose now. I've purposed that the song I've kept in my heart should be unleashed that my God might be glorified, that my spirit might be humbled, and that possibly, somebody might be encouraged by what He has spoken into my life.