Longing and Hope

In high school, I chose to do my final College Writing essay on the topic of searching; our natural intuition to keep on moving, to keep searching, to progress.

Before I wrote this essay, my English teacher showed me a song called, "That's what the lonely is for." It talks about being lonely and how it pushes us to fix this loneliness by redeeming and reforming the way we're living.

Another song that is relevant to this idea of longing and searching is, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" by U2. The song deals with our humanistic impulse to satisfy this craving that we all feel. The writer talks about how he has jumped boundaries for love only to be fooled by it's promise to satisfy, or how he held hands with the devil only to be left feeling empty, or even how he gave his life to the Lord but still has this sense of emptiness. But his voice isn't of sorrow, it's of joy.

All these feelings of longing and emptiness are not something we should be scared of. Though they are negative feelings, they point to a much larger picture. We are not made to be satisfied here on earth. We just can't do it. We ultimately have three choices to fighting this sense of emptiness: 1. We give in to temptation and continually pleasure ourselves until we are left with nothing but a perverse sense of happiness 2. We accept that we will never be happy and we content ourselves with what we have or 3. We become aware of this idea that we are not finished.

So whenever I feel down or blue or lonely or scared or empty...it's not because I'm not filling this void in my life, but because I'm not yet done with my purpose of life. I have to keep on searching and reforming and redeeming all that is around me until we reach "shalom", or how God intended things to be. Of course, this takes a great deal of discernment and self-control. We are naturally born on a hill facing downwards. To redeem everything the way God intends, we have to turn around and scale the mountain the hard way. Hopefully, finding that it was really just a gentle slope all along.