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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