"The Good Life": Part 4 - Hunger and Thirst

I took a trip this past fall, spending a few days with a couple of friends in the Adirondack region of upstate New York. These are friends of mine from the ten years or so that Becca and I spent in RI, through college and afterward. One of these friends used to spend his summers as a trek guide for the boy scouts up in the Adirondacks, and it usually works out that once every couple of years we’re able to get a trip up there on the calendar; hiking, canoeing, etc., almost always in the Fall.

There's just something about the Adirondacks in the Fall. Even just getting there, making your way across mid-state Vermont, is an experience in itself.  It's as if, driving along, you cannot help but be overcome by this palpable sense of desire, wishing you could just consume these vistas; breathe them in, in all their breadth and beauty, and make them PART of you.

As parents with our children, we have instances like this, too. It's a sublime thing when we find ourselves stumbling upon this sense of awareness from time to time that we are - in that particular moment - experiencing a single, particular snapshot of time with our kids possessed of such untold and transcendent meaning that our heart just ACHES. Perhaps it's that we stumble into a moment of a child’s innocence and unfiltered, joyous PRESENCE. Maybe we feel their adoration, or it's the smell of their hair as they collapse into an embrace. And it is at once an unspeakably deep joy - a joy so deep it unleashes pangs of an even deeper longing - while in the very same instant it is a joy mixed with mourning, because we know that it’s an instant that must eventually and inevitably pass. Children are exhausting and maddening and destructive, but we all have these moments where we catch a glimpse of that transcendent perfection of joy and purpose beneath all that, and in those moments, we wish we could reach out and grab time itself; pull it to our chest, and soak in that distant perfection until our hearts don’t ache anymore.

We could describe similar moments of beauty that occur between spouses, or in the context of time spent with really good friends: moments that come upon us and we find ourselves wishing that they would not pass us by. Moments of truth and beauty and longing that we wish we could just breathe in, consume, such that they might become a PART of us in some lasting way.
And maybe this is all just way too poetical for you, but I do believe that all of us - if we’re paying attention - experience these moments where we could say that we are soaking in or receiving exactly what we’ve always longed for and, in the midst of that very joy and gratitude - at the heart of it - we unexpectedly discover an even deeper, more profound longing.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”, Jesus says, “For they will be satisfied.” We are a hungry people. We are thirsty. We are FULL of desires and wants and longings, yearnings and unfulfilled aspirations. But at the heart of all that longing lies something deeper; something more profound and more foundational. As I wrestle with this statement - as I press into the story of Jesus and the woman at the well in John 4, and as I seek to understand what lies within and beneath the longings of my own heart - I come to this understanding:

At the root of every other human desire, lies the hunger of the heart for God.

Such that, even were we to receive and accomplish every earthly thing that we might ever hope or imagine, this hunger would and will remain, until such a time that we find ourselves restored to our father and creator in and through the embrace of Jesus.


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