longings...

longings longings longings...

ugh...

coming face to face with the fact that there are empty places in our lives that haven't been filled...can be...well..how shall we say it...painful? excruciating? numbing?

for whatever reason, this has been the year i have awakened to longing...i am looking at my own personal yearnings...desires...wishes...those places in the deep part of my soul that feel hollow and empty and unsatisfied...

i'm not gonna lie and say it has been great...it has brought pain and sadness in some areas..but...me being the glass-half-full kinda gal...i can say...with total honesty that allowing myself to listen to my longings...rather than running from them...has radically changed me...

we all yearn for more...wanting more than we have...more love, more enjoyment, more passion, more hope, more rest...whatever the "more" is...we all yearn...

we all crave for more...that hope of finding something that will satisfy the gnawing we feel in the stomach of our soul...

what i know for sure...is that we were made for more than this world has to offer us...

i believe that our yearnings, hopes, longings...that if we really look hard at them...what we are saying is that there just isn't enough of whatever it is we are craving...
be it...love, peace, hope, friendship or intimacy...there isn't enough of it on this earth to completely satisfy us...i believe we will always want more...

i believe that God has designed us to want more out of life...and sometimes...we are not satisfied until we get it...our prayers may consist of pleading with God...asking Him for the things we so desparately long for...still...we are left longing...

talk about frustration! a no-win situation...i had always looked at my longings as things that i needed to overcome...that i would either get it...or not...and learn to live with it...

what we don't have shapes us more than what we have...those holes...the areas that are not filled...i have started looking at them in a new way...our longings show that we have a hunger...a hunger for something...this hunger can drive you to frustration...or...it drives us to the only one who can truly satisfy...our Lord...that is...if...we listen...

finding the courage to stare into the deep "holes" of my own soul has fostered a dependency on God that i have not known before...

i have come to the realization that i may not get everything i long for in this world...but in that...i am learning that first...there will never be the absence of pain...there is no life without pain...and for me...i am learning that getting things easily will never make me into the woman God is calling me to be...

what i know now...is that there are areas in my life that i cannot get filled outside of God...i can do some temporary filling...but not the kind my soul craves...the longing to be filled and the longing to be known...all draw me to Him with an intense pull that began the day He made me...