Losses and Longings (George Stulac)
Over There (courtesy of gimmeocean under a Creative Commons License)
Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you…. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
Augustine, Confessions
Augustine, one of the great church leaders and saints of the church from its early days, said we long to praise God. I confess to being seldom conscious of longing to praise God and being half-hearted about it when I do praise him. Mostly I’m conscious of what I’m doing and thinking and feeling. It takes some deeper reflection even to identify my longings. In that, I imagine I’m fairly typical.
However, that seems to be changing these days. During this pandemic, we are suffering losses of health, loved ones, finances, careers and human contact. Our losses are bringing our longings closer to the surface. I hear people talking more readily about their longings.
I wonder what God intends for us in such openly needy times. Surely these are at least opportunities for us to minister to others. We can ask caring questions and then listen to their stories of losses and longings, as Abram Van Engen reminded us last week. But is there perhaps more that God desires in this opportunity?
My wondering has sent me with curiosity to examine how Jesus handled people’s longings. I’m noticing not only how he listened and asked care-filled questions, but also how he pointed people to other longings which were at once more highly valuable and more deeply buried. As he did this, Jesus was forming people to live faithfully in their losses. In Jesus’ hands, experiences of loss became experiences of gain in spiritual formation.
Jesus heard people’s anxieties: “What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear?” In his Sermon on the Mount, he responded to such anxieties both by acknowledging them and by pointing beyond them: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” “Look at the birds of the air…your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” He was forming in his followers a longing for the kingdom of God. Further, he was helping them to make active choices to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
After his resurrection, Jesus had a similarly formative conversation with Peter. Jesus probed Peter’s longings by asking three times, “Simon, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” until Peter was grieved by the question and said, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Now Jesus may know everything, but he apparently wanted Peter to know and acknowledge and recognize and confirm his own longings. Having deserted Jesus previously, Peter was now longing to love Jesus faithfully. Jesus kindly handled Peter’s longing by allowing him to affirm his love three times, matching the three times he had denied Jesus. Then Jesus invited Peter into lifelong choices to love people (“feed my sheep”) and to love Christ (“follow me”).
C. S. Lewis insists that God invites us into extravagant longings. “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Right there, Lewis has put his finger on the half-heartedness which I confessed at the start. But Jesus is kindly prompting my own spiritual formation. With Peter, I long to be faithful in loving Christ. With the Carver community, I long for the kingdom of God among faculty, students, churches and society together. With my family, I long for my grandson to be healed of leukemia and to be formed into a man who loves people and loves Christ. With John in Revelation, I long for an end to poverty, famine, pollution, greed, injustice, sickness and death, and for Christ to return with a new heaven and earth. “Come, Lord Jesus!” And, yes, with Augustine, I do long to praise God wholeheartedly.
We are made with deep longings that draw us to God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.
George Stulac is a ministry partner of The Carver Project and works with faculty ministry for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
Further reading:
Augustine, Confessions
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Return to The Carver Connections main page.