Daily Prompt: Longing

The Daily Prompt was to write about Longing

Longing implies an intense craving or ache for something or someone.  From a temporal perspective, the most poignant experience I’ve had with longing is for my mother who passed away in 96’.  There have been times especially early on, when I would have given almost anything for her advice one more time, or to hear her call me “sugar”.    I could say the same about many friends and loved ones who are dearly missed.

The second example that I’m familiar with are the times I’ve had the intense longing to see my children.  Both of them moved away after high school.  One of them has since returned and lives nearby, but my eldest is still too many miles away to meet for lunch or just stop by.  As a mother, it’s not even that you just desire their presence, you often long for the way things used to be.  We want them to grow up and become their own person, but at the same time, we want to hold them forever.  It’s an emotional quandary at times.

As the years roll by, another longing becomes apparent to me.  It’s one that I was never too familiar with in my younger days; a longing for the past.  As we grow older in a world that grows more violent and a society that seems to degrade by the minute, we long for simpler times, for peace and for the way things used to be.  We long for the people we miss, a chance to do some things over again and as our thoughts drift to our own mortality, we long to know we have done the best we could do.  For those of us who are Christ followers, we long to see the salvation of others.

However, speaking from a spiritual perspective, the first thing that came to mind when I read the topic for today’s prompt was a C.S. Lewis quote which it one of my favorites.  It says, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Although I have experienced longing in this life, there is something deep inside that is never fully satisfied and I know it won’t be this side of heaven.  This is a longing for my heavenly home when God has fulfilled His divine purpose for me on this earth.  It’s His call, in His own timing and I don’t worry myself about it.  I do believe that when I get there, I will never again long for anything.