“Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.” | Jim Elliot |

It’s a bit like reaching for the wind, longing is. You want something so badly you can nearly taste it but it always manages to elude your grasp. The whole affair is rather unpleasant actually. Wanting something you don’t have can tear you apart. Sometimes it’s illegitimate like jealousy and covetousness. Other times it’s justified, dare I even say, God-given. But you desire it so intensely you think your heart will burst; that’s where the pain comes in. Have you ever felt your heart hurt? Like the emotion just shoots darts of fire through to your very soul. Sometimes you’ll get sick like Amnon or you’ll wallow in self-pity like King Ahab. It is here, right here, when you feel the veins beginning to burst, the tears beginning to flow as the horrible pain squeezes water from your eyes; right then is the most crucial moment of all. You get to decide if you’ll break permanently or merely bend in the storm only to rise again, perhaps stronger than before.

You get to decide if you want to live.

Not the kind of dismal, half-hearted living you’ve been doing before. The kind where you ignore the dazzling wonder that’s all around you because you’ve been so focused on what you can’t have and the terrible unfairness of it all. The kind where you’re so focused on the ground that you’ve lost of the sky. Not that kind of lousy, pitiful, pathetic existence but the kind of living that makes your heart race. The kind where every adventure points to the Greatest Adventure of them all: living a life of surrender and obedience to the Most High. The kind where you treat every moment like the blessed and precious gift it is. See, this is where the finite meets the infinite. We push back against the Darkness and see the Light, the bigger picture. We lift our eyes from the here and now and peer into the Joy which lies beyond the walls of this world. We begin to understand, however slowly, that our legitimate longings ought not to keep us from intensely enjoying our little yet amazing lives.

So hold onto those longings and have hope, but don’t forget to keep living because life is so much more than our longings when the Most High is at the center of it all.

| Rise and rise again like a phoenix from the ashes until lambs become lions. |

|”I would have lost heart unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Most High in the land of the living. Wait on the Most High, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart. Wait, I say, on the Most High.” | Psalm 27:13-14 |

Afternoon walks where the Finite meets the Infinite in a blaze of glory and you can see the Most High’s hand of Beauty 🙂