Isn’t it amazing how fast your priorities, and your ideas of what’s important, can shift when you’re in a hard situation? It’s incredible how fast your perspective can change – it can happen in a heartbeat sometimes. Last week, I found myself laying on a ben in an Urgent Care getting an ultrasound on my leg, and finding out that I had a blood clot that stretched the entire length of my leg that needed immediate treatment. Needless to say, my day and everything I longed for in it changed in a hurry.
You know, when pastors preach on longing – and they say things like ETERNAL LONGINGS ARE NEVER SATISFIED WITH TEMPORARY THINGS – USUALLY what follows next is a little talk about how to not get caught up in chasing the “pleasures of this world,” and don’t go chasing expensive toys like lamborgini’s and big houses – be content, be humble – yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s a lot of warnings about chasing the things of this world. And don’t get me wrong – a lot of that is true! But here’s what I remembered as I laid on that hospital bed this past week…
When I was faced with the fact, and I mean really confronted with the reminder… of how fragile my life is… And how at the thought of losing it, all I could think about were my family and my friends and how my absence would affect them… How I just wanted them with me in that moment… What I realized is that all the other stuff I thought was important in the day – none of it really was. In fact, most of it is just stuff that I use, like all of us do, to cover up the deeper longings for connection, for meaning, for intimacy – so much of it is just covering up that longing with lesser longings that make me feel less fragile than I am.
Maybe the way to say it is that what I was reminded of is that we have a sneaky way of trying to fulfill longings by mixing up our intentions and our outcomes in our lives. There’s nothing wrong with having nice things – a great house, or a nice car, or improving your situation financially, or material blessings – nothing wrong with it – even if they are temporary. But those things are great outcomes of a life. They’re horrible intentions of a life.
If I try to fulfill my longing for connection, and intimacy, and meaning, and significance with STUFF, if I let myself get caught up in that kind of thinking – there will never be enough stuff to fulfill it – there’s always someone who has more. If I think that having more money is the answer, there will never be enough – it’s going to drive me to a place of insecurity – because when your money is your intention instead of an outcome in your life, it’s just a horrible task-master that’s going to drive you into selfishness and greed. If the accumulation of things, or accomplishments become your intention instead of an outcome in your life, you will never measure up – there’s always going to be one more thing to do, one more hill to climb, one more level to get to – and all of it is going to take you away from becoming the person you’re meant to be – the healthiest version of yourself where the outcomes of your life flow from the purpose you were created for.
You know, people go through different phases of life in what they value – when we’re kids, what we value in life is getting things. And when you reach adolecense, life becomes more about getting, or gaining experiences. But then as you reach maturity in life, what you realize is that what’s valuable is people – it’s about relationships. The problem a lot of people have is that even though they get older, they never really develop in what they value – so they’re getting older, but they’re still about aquiring things. Erwin McMannus says that they’re no longer about legos – they’re about Lamborgini’s. Right? Or they get stuck in adolacence – and the reason they may be 35 and they keep churning through relationships in their life is that it LOOKS LIKE what they value is people, but what they really value is experience – and once they’ve had the experience… they don’t know how to deal with it. Don’t know how to steward it. Don’t know how to make it last or take it to the next level.
It says in Isaiah 40:2: 2 “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Tell her that her sad days are gone and her sins are pardoned.. Why are her sad days over? Because her sins have been pardoned. What does sin do? What’s the primary effect of sin? It separates us from God and separates us from each other. Sin is first and foremost a relational problem. It’s the relationships in life that are most deeply affected by it. That’s why Jesus says that if you learn to love God and love each other, you’re gonna get pretty much everything else right along the way –Because every longing you have, the longing to be seen, the longing to be known, the longing to be loved, the long to be accepted, the longing to be connected, the longing to have a purpose, the longing to be whole and healed – these are longings that God designed us to fulfill in relationship to Him and relationship to each other –
So when you go to the family get together for Christmas and you feel sad… or your sitting alone on New Year’s and you feel that twinge of longing – like there’s a disconnected piece of you that’s just kind of flailing like a loose wire in the wind and you feel unseen and unknown and unloved – that’s a longing that can only be fulfilled in relationship… That’s why the bible says it’s not good for man to be alone – because you’re longings that are hard-wired into you can’t be fulfilled outside of relationship. When I was laying on that hospital bed on Thursday, nothing else mattered other than the relationships – the people – in my life. Instantly, I no longer care about what year my car is, what the details of the Christmas services are at church – all I care about is being connected to the people I love and having them connect with me. It happens that fast. All that other stuff is just layers that we pile up on those core longings…
Jesus coming to earth as a baby means our sad days are over – we now have the grace to connect with God and each other. God is showing us the way to strip it all back and cut down to the core longings underneath all the stuff and experiences we pile onto it and make it about. Your saddness isn’t about your lack of stuff and experience – it’s about a lack of connection and a longing for intimacy.
