groaning, day 2

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Lord, I was ever greedy of life, my attention always straining toward the parts of it that had not yet come…toward what was about to be, or might be, or hopefully would be, and especially toward those things that, by Your mercy, might turn out not to be after all.
I panted with longing to suck each segment of life dry of its pleasures. I plotted, with myself but despite myself, about tomorrow…about the “later” that was constantly morphing into now. You know how I worked, Lord, recklessly but prayerfully, to set time’s courses and, in Your name, to sculpt them to my intention, to my definition of good.
But I am old now, Lord, and my prayers grown old as well. So it is that daily I am drawn, as here, to pray, “Deliver me, My Lord, from this my great sin, and take me, free of doubt and other longings, into Your good plan.” (Prayer by Phyllis Tickle, Weavings, Volume XXV, Number 4)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 31

Scripture for the Day: 2 Corinthians 5:1-10

Reading for Reflection:

To every heart set on this journey of love comes seasons of great pain due to an awakened heart not yet answered.  God awakens longing for Himself within us and then very purposely delays satisfaction of that longing.  Our hearts find an all new thirst, and we begin to burn with the holy expectation of His coming to us to quench what He Himself has slain us with.  No longer contented by any other pleasure, we cry out for what we are certain He will impart to us: eternal love from His heart.  Yet, instead of divine satisfaction, we find greater heartache.  We find ourselves caught in that great chasm between longing and fulfillment.  Instead of encounters with our Lord, we find Him seemingly more absent than before. 

     Understanding God’s own longing keeps us from hurt and offense at the Lord when He does not immediately answer the pain of our heartache.  Our proneness is to think that God must not understand the pain of our desire when He does not answer us immediately.  When we do not understand that our longing originated in His own heart, we are prone to believe that He has left us alone in this painful delay out of lack of sympathy for our suffering state.  Our misunderstandings tell us that if He did know the pain we were in, He surely could not bear to leave us in it.  Quite the contrary, when we trace our longing back to its source, we find the wounded-by-love heart of God.  It is from the deep of His heart that our own deep groans come forth.  He knows that without longing we cannot enter into the fullness of His love, and therefore, in His absolute kindness and jealousy over us, He places within us this dagger of desire for Himself.

     These periods of unfulfilled longing are inexpressibly necessary to our journey of love.  Of what worth is water without thirst?  Of what value is fruitfulness without barrenness?  What is desire satisfied without desire unmet?  How our hearts need to go hungry before we are fed.  We must encounter the depths of longing’s ache in order to ascend to the heights of divine exhilaration.  He carves us out and enlarges our capacity through hunger and desire that He might fill us with Himself.

     When we are flooded with the pain of unanswered desire, we often forget that this Divine wound originated in His heart and not our own.  We view our pain as the absence of God’s answer instead of the presence of it.  God does not give Himself except to the hungry and destitute of heart, yet we cannot produce hunger for God.  It is He Himself who causes hunger to arise and the prayer for fulfillment to emerge.  He establishes in us the desire that He intends to satisfy.  As surely as the pain of our longing is the certainty of His coming to us.  When we begin to feel our own hearts moving in desire and in painful reach for God, we may rest assured that He will answer us.  Where there is Divine longing, there is Divine fulfillment.  Though they may be separated by a time gap, the two are so interwoven and undividable that you cannot experience one without soon knowing the other.
     When we begin to cry out to know Him and experience Him in deeper ways, we should not be surprised when He answers us by wounding us with greater longing.  It has always been His way.  In fact, we may look at these desires from Him as promises.  For He is the Inflictor of longing’s wound, and He alone can cure us.  A Divinely implanted desire is nothing short of a Divine promise of the true beginnings of Love’s working its way into our soul, we will not so quickly lose heart in the aridity of longing’s throws but instead find comfort in the truth that His answer has begun within us.

     If we are not careful, we will misinterpret these times and possibly deny some of the greatest fruits to be born in the realm of intimacy.  These seasons make a way for the seasons that we crave most.  Though they appear to us as brick walls blocking our way forward, they are indeed doorways into greater love.  Behind these periods of dryness is the flaming heart of the God-Man who refuses to have a bride not stricken with lovesick desire.  For what is a bride without a longing and thirsting heart?  His strategic delays are all about awakening love within us.  He opens our eyes with a vision of His beauty and then steps back just out of our reach so that sincere longing might be cultivated within us.  He prepares the way for a greater revelation of Himself by setting in place the desire that will be its prelude.

     To the seeking heart, longing is often mistaken for emptiness—the pervasive feeling.  We touch these places of frustration where the barrenness within us is crying out to be filled.  Because we don’t feel sweetness, as we think longing should feel, we assume that our hearts are only dry and unfruitful.  We feel we can’t even “long” for God.  Yet one of longing’s most common faces is emptiness.  It is the dry side of desire and the empty side of love.  There is no sweetness about it—only raw barrenness lifting its voice.  This frigid form of longing is yet indeed longing though it is a lovesickness devoid of swooning and thick with the frustration of dissatisfied desire.  When longing comes in its dry attire, we so often do not recognize it, and we lose heart very quickly.  Yet we must learn to recognize this face of longing and receive it with an open heart, just as we would if it came with tears and sweet tenderness. (Deep Unto Deep by Dana Candler)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: O Heart Bereaved and Lonely

O heart bereaved and lonely,
Whose brightest dreams have fled
Whose hopes like summer roses,
Are withered crushed and dead
Though link by link be broken,
And tears unseen may fall
Look up amid thy sorrow,
To Him who knows it all

O cling to thy Redeemer,
Thy Savior, Brother, Friend
Believe and trust His promise,
To keep you till the end
O watch and wait with patience,
And question all you will
His arms of love and mercy,
Are round about thee still

Look up, the clouds are breaking,
The storm will soon be o'er
And thou shall reach the haven,
Where sorrows are no more
Look up, be not discouraged;
Trust on, whate'er befall
Remember, O remember,
Thy Savior knows it all

Closing Prayer
Loving God, the earth moans, in need of your healing. Help me be a peacemaker today—one who carries your vision and takes the small actions that contribute to healing for the world. Amen. (The Uncluttered Heart by Beth A. Richardson)