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Oops. I let another traffic jam pile up with my posts. It has been hard to find the mental space to edit. This post I wrote in March as I took a day trip to Luxembourg and processed my experiences from the month...
We travel because we long to see beauty,
We seek relationships because we long to be loved,
We eat because we long to be full.
Yet any longings that we have here can only be filled by Jesus — seeking God is the only thing that makes sense in this life. And I think I can say this with an adolescent authority, having walked through experiences this past autumn that have reset my understanding of contentedness. God has my everything now. And I still find myself slipping back into, “Ah but I want to be here” or, "What if it’s not this”. But, overall, I’ve realized how fruitful and free it is to embrace the fact that I am not in control, really because of what God did with my housing. (And bank account, and other logistics...) I can see the fruit of making decisions out of fear versus faith.
(And, side note, between bed bugs and roommates leaving France, I now clearly see how God kept me from greater hardship had I not listened to him last fall and stayed in what seemed to be the "most clear" opening for housing.)
I should start writing down the amount of times I think about or long for another place. All of us have a bit of longing, no matter what personality God created us with, because we were all made for another place. We were not made to be surrounded by violence and hatred and anger, which is why I think that even the most logical and rational person cannot help but be breathless when experiencing a corporal experience that does not often occur.
For me, longing is an ache, a whisper of remembrance that I carry around with me. What am I remembering? The garden. It is why I seek beautiful things, why I daydream stories, why this little gate in the backyard of my French family's home makes me feel like theres a bit of hidden magic on the other side.
Longing and poeticizing go together, I think. It has never been my tendency to look for the good or the positive. I lean towards negativity, but I think it's this paradoxical thought process of, "If I acknowledge it, then I will know it. I will control it, I will expect it."
But I can also OVER-romanticize things. I have been trying to lean into a graceful intermediate; looking for the beautiful, acknowledging the hardship, stepping forward with joy. (Remembering that Biblical joy is rooted in God's promises for us.)
What I am trying to say, C.S. Lewis of course perfectly captures in "The Weight of Glory",
"Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life."
At the end of this post is an even longer C.S. Lewis quote that feels like talking to and old friend who "just gets you."
In a similar vein of contentedness and joy, I have been reading through the Old Testament with a good friend. It has been a wonderful encouragement as well as sweet accountability. Even though it's over Facetime, each Sunday we meet and discuss what this study has been teaching us. It is often very timely, like this week.
We were reading about Ahab and how he wanted to be told the truth, yet he did not like how Micaiah never "prophesied anything good about him." Ahab wanted God to conform to HIS agenda. I have been called out by Ahab's prideful approach, and have been praying through this as I seek God's guidance for next year. I often tell him, "God, if you wanted me back in Paris, I know you would provide: community, housing, finances, and so on. But I don't really want to be back...God I won't be comfortable if I am back..." I think I have defined God's will for myself, what my life "should" look like. And this isn't to say that God forces us to do anything, we have free will still. But a life surrendered to God's will fills that space of longing, at least as best as it can in this life.
The problem when we think that we can define God's will for us is that when things do not go as we anticipate, we blame God or think He has abandoned us. What if, instead, we determined to trust God with whatever He allowed? How will you respond if enemies surround you, illness steals your health, or you lose your livelihood or a loved one? Will you believe that God has determined a greater purpose in you, for you, and through you? Seeking God involves more than a verbal commitment and an illusion of surrender. True surrender happens when we love the Lord more than ourselves and our plans. The depth of our surrender is tested when God’s ways do not conform to our plans.
Other Thoughts and Musings from March:
The title for this post comes from a conversation with Marie, the 19 year old daughter in the family I live with. Her favorite pastry is a Merveilleux, a meringue cream mountain blanketed in chocolate pieces. We were saying how the pastry is the perfect combination of soft and tough and sweet and bitter, and I joked, "Comme la vie, mais c'est quand même assez merveilleux" with a little wink. "Just like life, but hey, it's still pretty marvelous."
I went to Normandy (Normandie) and Brittany (Bretagne) for winter break. It has been so fun to learn more about France and all of the cultures and regionalisms of which it consists!
I have not even talked about the protests... this month was extremely frustrating because of the trains! But don't worry, I was not near the trash can fires.
It's going to be weird to come home to a place where I can engage in conversation. Because even though my French is better, I still don't have much to add because most of my conversations in French are at school or with the family, where, even though I understand, they talk about things I can't add to. Students, family things... I often just zone out and become a piece of the furniture. I try not to look at my phone, but I'm not sure what else to do with myself. So I try to listen and engage with humility: it's not that they don't try to include me.
An uncomfortable faith conversation with the family I live with led to this prayer.... "Lord I’m not someone who can form compelling arguments in the midst of a conversation. I’m a writer, thinker, processor. Please guide me in this home as I feel like I need to logically and cerebrally defend the faith. Lord, I trust you for the words. You have made me as someone who evangelizes with actions, but I know you want to form my depth of understanding so I can explain my beliefs. Help me not settle for a tame and casual walk with You that does not require bold faith or hardship. May I not think that I cannot pray adequately or share the gospel effectively. You has so much more for us.”
The C.S. Lewis Quote:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music 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—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
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