Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

CHRISTMAS YEARNING [12-17-19]


Gloria usually chats with me before church, because she doesn’t like people, and I fit the description of non-person better than anyone she knows at church. Maria didn’t know about Gloria’s person recalcitrance, though, and so invited her to a book club that is really a spiritual yearning club.

Gloria went, and was dumbstruck. “I can’t understand why any of those women are still in church,” she said to me. “They’ve all had terrible experiences in conservative churches, growing up, and even later, sometimes way into their adult years, mostly just because they are women. They’ve been treated like non-persons.”

 “It’s because of the yearning,” I said. “They’re yearning to fill what Augustine called that ‘God-shaped void.’ A lot of people give up on the yearning, because of what they’ve suffered in church, but these women haven’t. I admire that. But it’s not just because of their endurance. It’s also because of God’s perseverance. That’s what creates the yearning.”

Perhaps we see the nature of yearning most in this jaded world in children at Christmas. They think they are yearning for a particular gift, but yearning is not specific. What they really want is that sense of being in touch with God, of being loved beyond even the love of their parents. They yearn for completeness.

Yearning is far more than wishing or wanting. If you are filled with yearning, getting what you want or wish for won’t satisfy you.

By God’s design, Christ is far beyond wanting or wishing. Nobody wants a savior born as a helpless baby, to unwed parents of poverty, in a fourth-world nation. But we all yearn for that savior. God makes sure we don’t settle for less in a savior, by making sure the things we wish for won’t satisfy us. It’s only what we yearn for that satisfies.

John Robert McFarland

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