Blog – 7-25-19
God has been teaching me a very valuable lesson this past year. There’s a good side and a bad side, a healthy side and an unhealthy side, to most everything in life. Longing can be our worst enemy when we hunger and thirst for the wrong things in life. When we yearn for more money, a better job, more stuff, or think more friends is what we need to make us happy, it’s an unhealthy longing that will lead to constant feelings of discontent.
But if our hearts ache with a deep longing to know Jesus better, that’s a healthy longing that will deepen our faith and help us find contentment, no matter what is happening around us.
As I’ve written in this blog before, this past year has been a long season of waiting for me. And to be honest, waiting is something I don’t always do very well. I am a “get-it-done” kind of gal, and I live most of my life in race mode.
I’m also a huge dreamer, which is a good thing in many ways, but sometimes us dreamers get lost in the dreaming and forget to be content in the present. We get impatient in the waiting that is so often the case before dreams come to fruition. We can get trapped in the longing for that elusive “someday” when all those big dreams we love to dream come true.
This past year there have been amazing, wonderful, dreams-come-true kind of things on the horizon. The prize has been so close I could almost touch it, but it has remained just outside my reach. It’s been a season where the sting of longing has been deeply felt in my spirit.
But as I said at the beginning, there’s a good side to this as well. As I reflect on this season, I can honestly say it’s been one of the biggest seasons of growth in my spiritual walk. I have learned to trust God at a deeper and deeper level. I have learned to let go, I mean REALLY let go, of things I can’t control. I have learned to appreciate all the incredible blessings I already have. I have learned what’s important and what really doesn’t matter.
And the greatest lesson I have learned is that God’s desire for me is to move from an unhealthy longing to that healthy longing for more and more of Him. Longing is good, as long as it’s for the right thing!
And because He loves me so much, God is continuing to allow me to wait as He draws my heart closer and closer to Him. He is nurturing an insatiable desire in the depths of my soul to have more and more of His Word planted deep in my heart. He is cultivating my yearning to step into more and more of who and what He has called me to be. He is making my mind more and more receptive to how I can be the light of Jesus to a hurting world.
When living feels hard, when things get taken away one at a time, when you think things couldn’t get any worse but then they do, when dreams don’t get fulfilled, when your health takes a sudden turn for the worst, when friends let you down, when it feels like all you have left is your faith, when you long for something more…….that’s the perfect time to trust and believe that God will meet you with arms open wide, ready to shower you with the peace and hope that is found in Him alone. That’s when you can make the decision to turn your unhealthy longing for a quick fix into a healthy longing for God’s peace.
We have decisions to make every single day: Am I going to keeping longing and waiting for contentment to come “someday,” or am I going to live my best life possible by surrendering and living my life with abandon for Christ today? Am I willing to exchange the worldly longing that kills and destroys my peace for a Godly longing that draws me closer to Him? Am I going to choose to stay stuck in unhealthy longing, or am I going to allow the hard seasons of life to draw me closer to Him?
I pray you will join me in choosing the healthy side of longing. Turn things around and let the greatest desire of your heart be for a deeper relationship with Jesus. Dig deep into His Word. Surrender your life to Him more and more.
Nurture a healthy longing so you can start truly living!
Hugs and love, Jill