Verge of Tears

College sophomore Caroline Hite pulled my thin jacket around and zipped it up to my chin. I wasn’t quite prepared for the cold this Tennessee Fall was threatening. It was dark and I could not see the green circular lawn as I walked the diameter from the library to my dorm room. 

With a dreary attitude, I slumped up the steps to the third floor. With dramatic disappointment, I flopped down on my simple twin bed and gave a large exhale. 

“What’s the matter?” My roommate and best friend inquired. 

“I miss him!”  I was seriously on the verge of tears. 

“Who?” She asked with a tinge of girly excitement, yet knowing that I told her everything and she knew I did not even have a current crush. 

“One day I am going to love someone so much. One day it will hurt to be separated from him…I don’t know who he is…but I miss him now.”

Obviously, I am a hopeless romantic to the core. Randomly, that vivid memory crosses my mind and I smile. I still feel the cold breeze blow against my cheek and I remember that longing that I had in my heart that has now been filled.  James. James is that man that I was missing. 

And today that longing grabbed my beating heart in a whole new way. Bleeding and still pumping, the Holy Spirit grabbed my heart and tenderly yet firmly looked me square in the eyes and said, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

Did God long for me?!  Like that!  In a perfect, complete way know that he had created me and I was yet to be born?  Does he look at me now, at every detail of my little life and know that he made me to love coffee, know that he made me to crave the words of CS Lewis and while I read “Surprised By Joy” it was an event created to be at the beginning of the world?  Did he long for the day when I would have my own daughter and cry tears of love and joy at the realization that this is just a glimpse of the love the Father has for me?

And I am humbled. How?  HOW!  How can GOD love me?!  Want me?!  Wait for me?!  And I realize, he made me for Him. He has a purpose for me!  Oh God!  Grab me!  Kicking and screaming, wholly addicted to myself, and lazy out of selfishness and begin your work in me.

My toes are wading in the water, but I want to dive in!  

And I walk the diameter of this world. It is dark with arrogance. My heart is not in the right place. But I miss someone. Someone I will be with for eternity. One day I will sing HOLY. HOLY. HOLY. And one day I will be complete and whole and all my questions will be answered and all my hurts will be undone. Dear Jesus, my heart aches for that day I will be with YOU!  And the Good News is that You want to be with me too!

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Pornographic Love

As a young girl, Christmas was sheer magic.  One year, a very long time ago, a few months before the holidays, I saw a commercial.  We did not have a television in our home.  I must have been at a relative or a friend’s house, but I vividly remember seeing a commercial of the very thing that would fill the hole in my heart and that would make me forever happy and perfect.  A Poppel.  A plush little toy that would instantly transform into a ball…or so they did on the commercial.  With a fun little song, this thing transformed from a stuffed animal into a plush ball back and forth, back and forth and the world was just as it should be.  And I wanted one.

I dreamed of it day after day and I counted down the days until Christmas…until it was Christmas morning and I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  My life was about to be completely meaningful and perfect and I would never want anything else ever again.

Well, something happened that was not a habit growing up in a household with eight children.  I FINALLY opened a package that contained all my hopes and my dreams in that one Christmas present.  Not only did I get one Poppel, I GOT TWO!

But because you have a very similar story to mine, you already know the ending.  That thing just didn’t work like it had on the commercial.  It took every muscle in my little girl body to transform that animal into a plush ball …and it was still never perfectly round.  And it just didn’t pop out quite like it had on the television to that fun little song.  And I never told my parents (until they are probably reading it here) but that thing just did not fulfill me like it had promised to.

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist.  A baby feels hunger.   Well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim.  Well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire.  Well, there is such a thing as sex.  If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.  If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably, earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”  – CS Lewis

Daily, hourly, by the minute, I have these desires.  I want my world to be perfectly clean.  I want my husband to walk through the door with fresh flowers and a surprise date.  I long to look strikingly gorgeous every single time I peek into the mirror.  I want my daughter to always be polite and over succeed at every single thing she attempts.  I want to turn on the nightly news and hear the report that ISIS is forever gone and there are too many wonderful things happening to ever report.  I WANT ME AND ALL THINGS AROUND ME TO BE PERFECT!

Here.  It never can be.  But I do believe that perfect does exist.

According to covenanteyes.com, 68% of men view porn at least once a week.  A desire being fed by an empty substitute with detrimental consequences.  There is a real body to love.  Caroline, there is a place that is perfect.  We were not made for this world.  It is a desperate and empty search to try and find that completeness here on earth.  We were made with desires and longings that only a perfect God can fill and one day, those that turn to him, will experience all our desires met in complete perfection.