I am learning to befriend my longing. I am making peace with the ache in my chest.
My desires are left unquenched by earthly delights. I sense that so much is not right.
I am a nomad who moves through mercy and madness.
Scripture names the world as off-kilter and groaning for redemption. My inner dissonance draws me to promised newness, triumph, and restoration––of which we now see a glimmer.
“C.S. Lewis described sehnsucht as the ‘inconsolable longing’ for ‘we know not what.’ Sehnsucht is a feeling that you are missing something you love dearly but cannot quite explain to anyone, not even fully to yourself…
Sehnsucht is puttering through vulgar, mundane struggles, missing a home you cannot quite reach, and at the same time longing for a far-off land you have never seen. It is wanting to be in a place you cannot name, though whatever ‘it’ is feels familiar.” –Rebecca Reynolds
“This world is not our home” has always struck me as pious escapism. A convenient excuse to not engage with the beauty and brutality of life.
Sehnsucht, though, gives me permission to feel weary and restless––glimpsing belonging and still feeling displaced.
In the gospel, acceptance is found in the person of Christ because of His costly, astonishing grace. But it doesn’t dismiss the weight of the human experience.
A longing for more means I am an active participant in the mysterious in-between of this present world. Rather than write off my existence as meaningless until I float into heaven, this desire grants supreme significance to my everyday.
What do I love? When do I feel the burn of injustice? Where do I discover those “thin spaces” between heaven and earth?
If I am fully alive to the glory of a drab Tuesday afternoon, it holds whispers of the magic to come.
Eternal bliss isn’t a ticket out of daily life––it’s a portal into radically alive beauty and goodness.
The fierce gaze of the Lover moves this world right-side up.
On this dark earth, His face is the sun I’ve always yearned for.
Thank you, Carissa, for walking your readers through the realities of the temporal, passing world, of the in-between, and to the coming world of bliss and of eternal joy. The world that will be “right” and “good” and where darkness will no longer disguise itself as light.
The Sovereign, the Eternal God, makes rivers in the desert and roads in the wilderness. The Lamb Who slains the Dragon, is He Whose Sovereign will no one and nothing can thwart.
In the in between, one hand, one leg is riding on one side of the razor blade and the other hand and leg, on the opposite.
In the dark night of the soul, bright shines the River of God. His power can not become “white noise” in the ears or hearts of fearful, timid, and readily appeased, simple minded mankind. God always wins. Take heart my soul! I weep and rejoice at the same time.