The Longing...

I’d like to resolve to watch less TV. It is a pleasant and effortless distraction, but I don’t need a distraction when intentional focus is what I am missing. See, I have realized that, in Christ, I have freedom… Which has also strangely led me to the recognition that I have the freedom to be bored. That freedom sometimes feels like permission and permission can quickly become a desire and when life gets hectic, painful, sorrowful, then all of the sudden my freedom feels like and excuse for boredom.

So, I listlessly spend summer days escaping from the year that was and avoiding the year that will be. There are moments of hope that break the fog of ignoring, but no mountaintop is high enough to allow me to escape reality forever. In the lull of expected answers, half-hearted bible study, and time with friends where I ask lots of questions and give very few answers, I find myself detached from the anchor, slipping out of the harbor and unknowingly into the sea.

Sharing becomes a strange thing in the boredom because I am basically pulling from my experiential filing cabinet… Nothing new to share, too prideful to say so… So I regurgitate something old and everyone assumes that everything is… Well… Fine. The truth is that unlike blatant trials, boredom lulls us away with shallow questions or things that might be nice to pursue but never are. Boredom makes all things seems unnecessary and certainly like there is not any rush to get to them. God is easy to spot in blessing, easy to cry out to in pain… But not so in the mist… When senses are dull and revelation is dim and distant. Another mountaintop isn’t the answer and, clearly, a trial is off the table if we can help it. So, there is just this craving to know that God is there.

It reminds me of this Frederick Buechner thought expressed in an Alli Rogers song…

“Frederick rarely hears the voice of God. He says that silence is the answer most of all.

When the world has explanations for every miracle, how else would we have ears to hear Him call?

It’s not a steady rain, it’s more a longing or a pain. It’s in the aching that we know there is something more.”

And I guess right now, that’s just it. Because I long, I also know that there is something more. I long because I have hope. Both mountaintops and trials most certainly sit on the path ahead – the believer yearns for both though that seems like a contradiction – but in both the presence of God is made so real. It is not so much that we long to be pain free or overlooked for struggle… But to know that our peaks and valleys and all that falls in between is uniquely chosen for us by God. And that He is there… Present and active through it all…