[in which I provide no answers]

Is there really going to be a day when all my longings are answered? When my frailty forgets itself and my poor eyesight turns clear?

I imagine the routine pangs of disappointment will fade suddenly into the kind of joy that hurts.

I imagine the shadowy echoes of the trauma which has shaped us against our volition will reveal a new kind of glory and praise previously impossible or unknown.

I imagine there will be stories told for eternal ages about all the times we thought everything was lost, but actually the rescue was around some surprising corner.

I wonder if there will still be storms and torrents and ice, but we will all rejoice in the inclement weather because we not only have utter shelter in Christ, but entirely new bodies that come alive in the elements.

Maybe opposition will cease even as variety remains.

Maybe there won’t be fear, but right now my body aches, my heart pines and yearns and cries, and my eyes yield to the ache and yield their own music of tears, in the song of longing the earth is belting and whispering, whimpering, shouting:

COME!

Come.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy and come.

My outlook is brittle. I’m parched and tired. My imagination might not pull through this drought. How long?

Is there really a day of fulfillment of hope? When hope can at last be laid to rest forever because its object is with us?

Even on the best days – especially those – I find I might crack, like a great root breaks through a sidewalk or wall on its search for more. Desperate.

So little satisfies. I want to burst through the heavy clouds of mortality and this old creation and find myself in unspeakable wholeness.

I want an awful lot of things, but this one longing is greater, its wound more persistent than any other I’ve felt in this life.

Now there is only hope. Then there will be only substance. Answer.

There, I imagine the everlasting arms are waiting and will embrace me. There, I will look at God and in an instant nothing else will matter, yet everything else will mean more than it did before.

Is this day really coming? Why so long, O Lord?

Come, Lord Jesus; make me as I should be. Make this dying world new. And if not yet, make me what I must be for this time.

And make this ache matter.

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I can’t do justice to this feeling. It could be depression, except that it’s more forward-looking than that. I feel it in moments like these:

• Looking at the galaxy
• Spectacular sunsets
• People-watching
• A beautiful musical strain
• The perfect words coming together like a family
• Flocks of birds
• A deep blue sky
• Lines of traffic
• Nursing my child
• Playing the piano

It’s a feeling like I just want to RUN. And never stop running. And run right into the air and over the horizon, over the clouds, right into the sun.

Is this why I used to try looking right at the sun? Is this why when I snuggle my husband or my daughter I wish I could get even closer than skin? It’s like I’m tapping my head against the door into the fullness of reality, and on this side is the minute bit I can know, and on the other side is You, God. Like I’m always just missing You, kind of like seeing a flash in my peripheral vision. Like a thought that flees only as I Just barely know it’s there.

I’m on the wrong edge of utter happiness.

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How is it that every single thing that happens on this earth is on Your watch? That this leaf falling and those people laughing and that cigarette factory and every molecule and every world war are in Your hands, and – I believe – haven’t existed in vain?

Surely such a thing is beyond me. You are beyond me. That’s at once my problem and my reassurance.

Maybe I need far less than I think. Maybe now, as it will be then, I just look right at You. Just look right along that beam into Your astonishing, sweet, holy Face.

So I think I’ll try to live like that’s true, and let You handle the rest.

O, have mercy.