"I think what I do is simply bury [my unmet desires] (and I see others do it too). On one hand, of course we do. It feels like we have to. You cannot live your life with a constant awareness of hightened desires that are unmet, just as you can't go through your day continually pining for a life you do not have. You have to live the life you do have. But I find that from time to time God comes and actually stirs our longings and desires, awakens them...

"To bury the deep longings of our hearts is not a good thing. Doing so begins to shut our hearts down, and then we fall into that "get on with life" mentality. For me, that means bearing down and working. Getting things done. But my passion slowly fades away, and life recedes from me. I cannot bring to my work the zest I once did, so even my work suffers. Because my heart is suffering. It's like a form of slow starvation. If your body doesn't get what it needs, you can run for a while without it. But slowly the erosion begins to manifest itself. You get tired, your muscles ache, or you start having headaches or a thousand other symptoms. You need nourishment...

"The heart is like that. Thank God, we cannot force it down forever. Hurting, it begins to insist on some attention. Now we can either listen to those rumblings and let our hearts surface so that we bring them to God, or we can give in to some addiction. The starving heart won't be ignored forever. Some promise of life comes along and boom-- we find ourselves in the kitchen closet taking down a court of ice cream or cruising the Internet for some intimacy.

"God knows the danger of ignoring our hearts, and so he reawkens desire... God does this for our own good..to stir our hearts up from the depths we sent them to. He does it so that we don't continue to kill our hearts and so that we don't fall prety to some subsitute that looks like life but will become an addiction in short order.

"He sometimes does it so that we will seek the life we were meant to seek.

More often than not this awakening of desire is an invitation from God to seek what we've given up as lost, an invitation to try again...

"What God uses to awaken desire is not neccessarily what we long for. The things "in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things.. are good images of what we desire, but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of thier worshippers. For they are not the thing itself." They are not what we are longing for.

"I think many of us who long for a holy life have chosen the way of "kill desire," because at the time it seems there is no other way. And soemtimes, in the moment, this may well be our only choice. Certainly it is better to push away some longing if we know that yielding to it means giving way to temptation. But this is not the best way to holiness in the long run, for the starving heart will eventually seek some relief.

But there are desires we know cannot be met now.

"It may be too late to become a professional baseball player or musician, too late to have a child. This is the real danger zone, because it seems like there is no other choice but to put away this part of your heart. But to send your heart into exile because your longings have no hope of being met is also to exhile your heart from the love of God. And he would have your whole heart. It's hard to tell whether God is arousing some desire so that you may seek a new life or simply so that this part of your heart may be made whole in him. But whatever else may be the case, you have to begin by giving this part of your heart back to God. Above all else, your heart must find a safe home in him."

-- John Eldredge, "Walking With God" p 188

"The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful,
a puzzle that no one else can figure out.
But I, God, search the heart
and examine the mind
I get to the heart of the human
I get to the root of things
I treat them as they really are,
not as they pretend to be."
Jeremiah 17

"They cried out to the Lord
in thier trouble.
And he saved them from
thier distress.
He brought them out of
darkness
and the deepest gloom
Prisoners sufering in
iron chains
Let them give thanks
to the Lord
for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds
for men
For he breaks down
gates of bronze
and cuts through bars of iron.
psalm 107


I wonder how long I've been so resistant. I've been looking back over the last handful of years and count how many times he's stood at the door and knocked and how many times I plugged my ears, ran away, seeking something less than maturity, seeking something more like comfort on my own terms.

Last week he woke me early in the cold darkness. Go outside, he said. I got up, put my hair in a ponytail and walked away from the sunrise. "Stop trying to get your way," He rebuked me like a child.

How long have I been running? I have been looking at kindergarteners, wondering if I started to bury my heart before I even got to where they are now.

I am experiencing something of a paradigm shift. I've reached the perverbial end of myself-- an emptiness, a void (or rather a series of voids) that I have so actively avoided in my ongoing need to conquer and control everything in my life. I've come to the realization that there is nothing in me that is going to produce the answers that I need to keep walking. I am the roadrunner walking on air after passing the edge of the cliff. I have reached the point of no return where I have no self-reliance to save me now.

Yet I fear that I will turn back. I am terrified of my own tendency to let in a little light and then close it all up tight again when I begin to get scared. I am terrified of the force that seems to draw the doors of my heart closed so tightly-- that magnitism that becomes so much more apparent when the metals have just been pried apart. Are his hands strong enough to keep it all from slamming shut? Or maybe it is yet still the little by little process of things, that there will yet be two steps backwards.

But back to the shift. My vision is changing, my heart is turning, even as it feels like pulling a thousand ships one millimeter round.

I used to think of so many things as important "milestones"-- signs that I had made it. I have bought into this idea that life is a series of little victories and all of the growth we experience are like little merit badges we earn to move us closer to these important points of validation. But something in me has begun to change as the Father has moved deeper into my heart.

I am realizing that many of the ends in life that I seek are not ends at all, but only a series of means to a much greater end-- maturity in and intimacy with the Father. I keep thinking about this phrase: "He is fathering us towards maturity." All of these little things in life that we get so wrapped up in, thinking they are the real stuff of life-- education, career, marriage, family-- what are they but the media through which the Father moves us closer to his own heart, the ways in which he molds us into the women and men he had in mind at creation.

I've had it backwards for a long time. I think, "Oh, he is growing me in this area to prepare me for my career. This piece of my character is being developed for marriage. I am being challenged in this area because it will emerge later with my children." Yes, these little growths will bring us further down the road, but those later points on the road are yet more opportunities for growth. He has promised that he will continue the work he began in us until the day of Christ. There will never be a day, until I look into the face of Jesus, that I will have arrived. And that is a strange realization for me to come to. I suppose many of you who can run laps around me in age will only chuckle at my 23 year old wisdom.

I have often wondered what it means when people say, "all of this is but a shadow." I am now, in some tiny way, beginning to understand. It isn't about any of this-- it is about Jesus, about the Father, about his Glory in all that he has made and all that he is making in us. That all of these peices that make up my life are but a fleeting mirage of how absolutely unfathomable the Father is.

I am giving you a new heart. A few weeks ago, the ring I've been wearing for years broke in half and, in a sort of independent way, fell off of my hand. Do you ever have those strange, inocuous experiences that suddenly seem exceedingly significant? Somewhere in the middle of my heart, it was as though the Father simply said, "It is time for something else now." One of those moments that signify the reality that you are really never going to be the same again.

Over the last few weeks, I've been taking a long, hard look at the road I've walked over the past few years. I am seeing myself sitting in a humid, empty dorm room, alone, at the end of a stark hallway-- locked in with the Lord as he bears down on my heart, breaking it all apart, destroying everything. Your religious resume is of no value to me, he said-- what I am after is you, my child. I am looking at a terrified eighteen year-old still keeping everyone out. I look at seven months eight hundred miles from home and realize how hard I remained, despite my intentions, my hopes, my very active move towards growth. I see myself running back to "normalcy," hoping everything had been fixed and finding a life even harder than ever, faced with betrayal, heartbreak, difficulty, exhaustion, poverty, and confusion. Death and loss.

I look back at a summer in which I legitmately thought the Lord had abandoned me for good-- the deepest doubt that has ever pressed itself upon me. I remember sitting on the deck, saying "I wonder if I am even following Christ anymore."

And then a strange moment where everything turned, a season of quiet, some rest before a raging storm of uncertainty. Emaciation.

And I keep thinking about that question, "Where is your heart?" These past few months have brought me face to face with the unfathomable darkness of my heart. I was confident in my well-established methods of growth and self-knowing. Until He pressed upon me the reality of all I am not, all that I lack, the seemingly thousands of voids that lurk, uncharted. I am suddenly aware of the hallways full of rooms that have not been opened. Doors I've kept closed. Parts of my heart that I've merrily tried to move past.

But a few weeks ago, I made the mistake of asking "show me what it means to give everything." And so he has led me down those dark hallways of the heart. Everything means everything. And so, ever so slowly, I find my hand in the hand of the Savior as we very gently begin to turn some handles. He has begun to use those unmet longings, the brokeness, the anger, the hurt, to chip away some of the rust on the locks. For I am gentle and humble of heart, he reminds me.

And so there is pain. There are walks at sunrise in which I am reminded of my nothingness. But I am simultaneously learning that the Father means it when he says, "All that is mine is yours;" I am beginning to listen when he speaks, his voice full of beauty, saying, "I want to give you absolutely everything." And why? Simply because I am His child, and he is my daddy.

I have been searching for a long time for something I thought would come through community, through what others might give, through circumstances that finally go my way. Things will turn out better someday, I have been saying. But I am learning a new reality-- that much of what I search for is a matter of a softened heart, the trust to recieve what the Father is already giving, the abundance that is there for us to take when we are able to breathe in his grace. Jeremiah writes this:

"cursed is the man who trusts in man
who depends on flesh for his strength
and hose heart turns away from the Lord.
He will be like a bush in the wastelands
he will not see prosperity when it comes
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert
in a salt land where no one lives

But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord
whose confidence is in him
He will be like a tree
planted by the water
that sends its roots by the stream
It does not fear when heat comes
its leaves are always green
It has not worries in a year of drought
And never fails to bear fruit

The heart is decietful above all things
and beyond cure
Who can understand it?
I the Lord
Search the heart
and examine the mind
to reward a man according to his conduct
according to what his deeds deserve

Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed.
Save me and I will be saved.
for you are the one I praise."

When my heart is hardened by my posture of self-reliance, how can I begin to fathom the greatness, the majesty that Lord desires for me? How can I begin to imagine the glory he wants to manifest in my life, in my body? Yet when I look to him for my strength, when I begin to realize that in his great love for me, he will provide over and above all I need, when I open my heart to recieve his love, something deep happens in me. No longer am I desolate and parched-- not longer do I live a life of poverty. Suddenly, I am filled and satisfied because I am ready to take in all the good he has for me.

And, like the night turns to day, all is changed and I no longer look to circumstances, relationships, or accomplishments as valuables to be attained-- in a sudden moment, all is changed and I realize that these are only shadows, only the small manifestations of a great Father, with whom the journey is the point. I no longer seek a comfortable income or easy relationships or a successful carreer as the means of happiness or any sense of accomplishment, but I seek the face of the Creator, who is found, peice by peice in all of these tiny things as he chooses to give them. It is through these things that he burns his indelible love upon our tender hearts. And I think that is far more beautiful and truly worthy of everything.