“… joy of every longing heart.”
Longing. It’s a feeling I live with, a feeling that has always colored my inner world. During this season of my life, a sense of longing seems to undergird everything I do. It’s sort of a pleasant pain—a pain tinged with the hope of something more—but sometimes it’s just plain painful. I long for so much. As Christmas draws nearer, I am sometimes overcome by loneliness. My heart is flooded with longing.
It really always has been. A sense of longing that has drawn me to creative fields, where I can find some expression. I want to create art that moves others as deeply as I am moved by art and beauty, to the point of tears. When I am creating—whether I am dancing, or writing, or designing my flowers—my longing finds at least a temporary refuge. That’s what creative expression feels like, to me: a place to put all this longing. With each thing I create, I just want so badly for it to point to God, to glorify God, to stir something in someone’s heart, to contribute to healing. I long to create of my life a hymn of praise to my God, my Jesus. I seek out that which quiets the heart’s longing: prayer and intimacy with God, beauty and creative expression, gratitude and praise.
Still, the heart protests; it is loud with longing. Sometimes, the strength of my desire disarms me—especially when I am so profoundly grateful for the riches God lavishes on my life. How can I be so grateful—to the point of weeping– and yet so full of longing? How can I wake to and walk each day in God’s Presence, and yet feel so incomplete? What is that I am I longing for? What was I really placed here to do? What are the true desires of my heart? What is it that leaves me so wanting? These are questions I ask myself, trying to identify the source of the longing. Because I know it isn’t just ingratitude. I try to fill my days with joy and praise, with journals full of gratitude, gratitude for the thousand gifts God instills in my days. This longing is not simply born of a lack of thanksgiving; it’s not just self-absorption (though it certainly sometimes is). I know it isn’t only that.
I could point to the things that are obviously lacking in my life. At 29, I don’t have a family of my own yet. I’m actually really proud of this, in some ways—I have high standards for my life, and I refuse to settle for anything less than that which is God-ordained and right for me. Still, it’s a struggle. I’m hesitant to say that I feel the pain even more at Christmastime, but I do. Every beautiful Christmas hymn is one I sing alone. When I bake cookies, trim the tree, and play Christmas carols, I can almost feel the absence of missing people. There should be little flour-and-sugar coated hands stamping shapes in the dough. A child who sits on my lap and listens to the Nativity story, whose curls I run my hands through, whose eyes grow heavy with sleep. There should be someone to embrace, to pray with, to love; an intimate, a husband. I go to Christmas services with my family, and feel a bit like I’ve outstayed my welcome. Like I’ve outgrown this season in my life… but what is there to be done? You can’t manipulate a miracle.
I walk through my days dreamy and distracted. I try to find sleep, and a line of poetry comes to my mind, unbidden. Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.
I’ve prayed for these heart desires for a long time now; I know God rewards and strengthens the soul that waits on Him. Still, the silence makes me weary. I know, I know, that I will settle for nothing less than God’s perfect will for my life—and I am well content to wait for that which only His hand can provide. Still, the point between here and there can feel so long. I can sometimes lose the zest and energy and sense of purpose in waiting.
Other things intensify my longing. It could be that I’ve always felt a little disenfranchised—a little bit on the periphery of acceptance and belonging. My inner circle is small. I’ve never come with a huge bandwagon of friends and followers. I’m not invited to every party and Friendsgiving. I’ve always walked a different, artistic, highly sensitive, and very often lonely path. Maybe I’m longing because I’m lonely. And I think we all are, to an extent. Every time I pick up my phone, it sounds so silly, but it’s like a tiny rejection. Silence—a sheer lack of people reaching out—feels like rejection. And the so-called rejections really pile up around the holidays.
Is that really all, though? Is this the source of my longing? It would be too simple if it were. Maybe it’s that I’m wavering in my purpose, my calling. If only I gave more, served more… If only I got my act together and really threw myself, with greater abandon, into my calling… If only I wrote more… If I could understand what my vocation is…
It’s clear that if I try to identify the source of longing, it’s impossible. The list becomes endless. This longing can’t be cured by good behavior, or even entirely by answered prayer. If I were to fulfill one great longing, another would open up in its place. I have a gaping emptiness within that can’t be fulfilled by anything here.
This longing, I have realized, is not situational. It’s eternal. It’s part of the human condition, the condition of being separate from God, from heaven. It’s why I identify so completely with Advent, with the ancient longing for the Messiah. O come, o come, Emmanuel… I understand the weariness and the weight of those words. I understand—on a level I cannot even articulate—what it means to wait in silence, for hundreds of years even, for an answer from God. I identify with the feeling of incompletion, because I am another weary soul desperate to be restored to God. It is this eternal longing that leaves me so wanting here. It is why my heart longs to sing these hymns and carols, and join my voice with those who sang hundreds of years before me. This longing is so much bigger than me, than my life. I am heartsick and homesick for heaven, for Jesus. We all are.
The one place I find refuge is in worship and in singing these Christmas hymns. I love the hymns that seem to articulate longing for Emmanuel. Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. O Come Emmanuel. And I love those that swell into praise at the sight of the star, the longed-for proclamation. The First Noel. Angels We Have Heard on High. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. What would it be like if this intangible, eternal longing became embodied and took form? Took on flesh? What if we could gaze directly into the face of our first love?—the love we long for all our days?
I imagine the moment the waiting and the heartache finally ended—when the darkness was pierced by the light of the heavenly star. Finally. No wonder heaven sighed into song—no wonder the shepherds’ hearts swelled with praise. All of creation exhaled—He is here.
Can you imagine every desire you ever had—every desire to be loved, to be found—was perfectly consummated? I don’t mean in the way we experience fulfillment here, in glimmers and hints and sidelong glances; highs followed by inevitable lows. I am speaking of desired fulfilled, embodied, answered, consummated, actualized, once and forever. What if the most fundamental desire—the desire of your very soul—actually came true? Came to dwell and take up residence in your life? “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14). Dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.
I am reminded of the exquisite pages that close C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. While I know it flies in the face of any kind of academic correctness, I can’t seem to edit this passage into a workable section. I must leave the words here, more or less unabridged, for they so beautifully express the source and the reason for all of this longing.
“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words; but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
…
This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion. Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you.”
You have experienced only the want of it. Of heaven. And that wanting, that longing, can only be fulfilled in heaven, when we are reunited, when we behold Him, Jesus.
And yet we know Him here, by that dear name—Emmanuel. God with us. “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14). This, this is the miracle too vast, too profound, too eternal to be comprehended. God with us. God with us in our longing, our brokenness, our joy, our need. How could it be? “I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.” (Leviticus 26:11-12). How could I walk each day with Him, though my sin is condemnable, though I do not and cannot earn His grace? How could it be, that He has accounted His righteousness to me—undeserving as I am—by and through faith? It is astonishing, but there it is: He has blessed those of us who believe “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” and it brings Him pleasure to do so; He saves us “according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise for the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:3, 5-6). How could it be? “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” (John 14:15). God with us. This is the miracle that meets us in all of our longing, our need.
I hope the awe never wears off. I hope that I am staggered, humbled, and awed by His radiant Being. By His Presence in my life, and His promise to stay with me. So many times, I have been so terrified that God will forsake me. And yet He promises never to leave me, never to allow anyone or anything to pluck me from His hand (John 10:28); He assures me that nothing, no created thing, can separate me from His love (Romans 8:39). I can come up with a million reasons why I don’t deserve the grace of God. Thank God He hasn’t arranged salvation that way; that He cannot and will not be a debtor to me and my so-called good works. Thank God it is “by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8). Thank God that He sent Jesus to save, redeem, restore. Thank God for Jesus’s miraculous birth; His perfectly surrendered, selfless life; His agonizing death; His abiding Presence with His children. Thank God His name is Emmanuel, God with us.
I still am filled with longing—and I always will be, as long as I am here. But sometimes I have the presence of mind to wake up and be overjoyed that I get to walk this day with God. That I awake to His Presence with me, and I get to say, along with Jacob, “Surely the Lord is in this place” (Genesis 28:16). If I long and ache and suffer here, I can only say that I was meant to it; sorrows were promised. I don’t serve a God who denies the existence of suffering, but meets me in the midst of it. This God does not offer easy platitudes when I am hurting, but sent His Son to be my consolation. He suffered so that I could be solaced. He died so that I could live. He looked straight in the face of the greatest agony, so that I could one day know that greatest joy. He has never shied away from suffering. Not even mine.
I need Him both as Son of God and Son of Man; I need a God who understands what exactly it is to weep and hurt and be so human; and to redeem and restore and transmute my suffering into good, as only God can. I have everything, everything, in Jesus. Even though, in my life, I experience so much pain.
“You may feel isolated in your community,” began a recent devotion, “Or like you’re in professional limbo and just want the right person to ‘discover’ you. Maybe you’ve never had someone by your side during Advent, and you feel the ache of loneliness—an ache that all the steaming wassail and woolen scarves in the world cannot comfort. The good news is this ache of loneliness is the very thing Advent answers. During these times of waiting, we can find a unique intimacy with God that comes from feeling our lack. The even better news is that Advent—a season full of longing—ends in the birth of the God who is with us.” My longing heart felt deep recognition with these words; with the sense of longing and disappointment and disenfranchisement, yes, and also the way these things draw me into intimacy and nearness with God. If they draw me nearer into the Presence of Emmanuel, then I must bless them, for there is no better place to be.
I’ve created a Christmas playlist full of longing and hope. Most of these are quintessentially Advent hymns; songs about the anticipation for and arrival of the Messiah. There are also some love songs & fun things there, because it’s good to remember to take things lightly. : ) My prayer is that, if you listen to it, you can truly listen to the words of those beloved hymns; that you can be still and be drawn into the Presence of Emmanuel. His Presence will save you and if you agree with Him and let Him have His good way with you, you will receive your eternal joy—one day you will have all. And as you wait for that day, His Presence will be your comfort and your hope, and in His light you will see light.
