Deep

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

"End the evil of those who are wicked, and defend the righteous. For you look deep within the mind and heart, O righteous God."  --Psalm 7:9

"As you wait and wonder in your own way this year, what is the deep desire of your heart?" 

--Gail Doering

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” 

― Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

It's Gail's question that got me thinking. I feel like I should know what the deep desire of my heart is, but I don't. It's buried underneath the layers of stuff, I suppose. If I were searching for it in my house, I'd clean up things until I found it. Maybe that's what I need to do inside myself, too. I suppose I am already. It's an ongoing process...journaling, therapy, prayer, conversations. 

Sometimes in the process it's like cleaning up a kid's messy room where peeling back the layers of dirty clothes and toys and miscellaneous detritus uncovers the glass of milk that is beyond yogurt stage and smells like sweaty feet, or, heaven forbid, the half-eaten hamburger that has become a maggot hotbed and smells like death. When I find something like that in myself, it doesn't just smell bad--it hurts. So naturally I'm not in a hurry to find it.

I wonder if the challenge of Frederick Buechner's quote isn't similar.  Does the world know what its deep hunger is?  There are so many different kinds of needs to be met. We do better at meeting the easier, more obvious needs.  Uncovering the less obvious is another potentially messy process.

God knows what lurks in the deep recesses of our hearts and minds, but God so often seems to be content with letting us figure out these things for ourselves.

So here we are.

I wonder if, as we are more mindful about enjoying the moments as they happen, we will look back and find that we have had some deep Buechner-described moments. And in that realization, find the ability to trust God that those sorts of moments will come again - maybe not in the same ways or for the same reasons, but just as deeply soul-satisfying.

And so we keep on waiting and wondering.

Thanks, God.