There are dreaming steps the soul longs to make that will not be ignored. And no matter how hard a soul may try to move past them, to put them behind, they are there, showing up inside in ways that can haunt a person. Try as we might to shush the yearning spirit inside us and focus on the good of our now, the longing fights to find freedom from the prison where it is locked away in the soul. It will not be ignored. It will beg and plead as if it’s desperate for us to know that it holds a secret to our very existence, a key to our own purpose.
There are voices inside that poke fun, calling us names for even considering the place we want to go. There is a voice of logic and reason that tells us our longing is senseless. There is a voice of moral duty that tells us the potential danger of this longing inside us for good reason. Careless pursuit on a road to destruction is not what any of us ultimately want. So we may shush the longings and shush again. It can seem like the only sensible thing to do. Yet, how it goes, at least for me, is that when I keep shushing, it feels like I’m shushing a huge piece of who I’m made to be, like my passion is slowly dying. And the longer I shush, the greater will be my fall when the longing finally breaks itself free, desperate to live.
This is a seven year story of struggling to quiet a broken longing and finding God faithful to my own weakness.
For months, I’ve been planning to share this story in the Thanksgiving month. I’ve been long jotting down notes and anticipating getting to share this story that is so dear to my heart. This story that has needed more time for me to tell myself than I first thought. Wednesday the week before Thanksgiving was the day I had set aside to give shape to it. But in the days before I had been so discouraged. And the Tuesday before my writing day I was trying to hold on to Psalm 121… He who keeps you never sleeps. He will not let your foot be moved. He will watch over your life, and your coming and going . Wednesday morning I woke up struggling to hold onto that – as I expressed to Nano. And when I sat down at the coffee shop, I got three slow paragraphs into this story before a man I didn’t know approached me. He said that when he saw me God had laid me on his heart. He encouraged me greatly and brought grateful tears from my soul. And he quoted Psalm 121. He will not let your foot be moved.
My God showed Himself faithful. He who keeps me will not let my foot be moved. It’s what He freely promises to us – to all who simply rest in who He is. He is not slow to remind us of His promise. And His promises are enough for these weary souls to feast on till we meet our last day in this world.
Today I share a story of the heart that I can never finish feasting on and never finish sharing. A story of how God shows His faithfulness to us, of how God showed His faithfulness to me through the very ache of my own longing.
It was May 28th. Seven days after I finished high school.
I stepped through the gate at my community pool, eighteen years old. Not really sure why I was there, I had just left a conversation that my heart didn’t know what to do with. My neighbors asked if I was okay but I couldn’t speak. There was a knot in my throat that wanted to break free in sobs. I sat there, a body holding a heart that didn’t know how to break. I had taken my scary, dreaming step and what seemed to happen was three years of hope falling apart.
I sat lost for a while. Blank.
Then away. Out the gate again, I walked aimless. Stepping slow over hot Texas sidewalks, tears falling on the pavement. I walked and I cried. Why did it go like this? What was wrong with me? I let my heart fall down. I read the whole world wrong. I made a mess.
I wandered and wondered. I was broken and it ached. My soul cried a song under the beating sun. And I sang it through gasps. “God will make a way.”
My grieving teenage soul sang that song in the heat, that song that felt like a ridiculous hope that somehow this broken place in my heart would all be made right one day. Like a hope that this broken longing inside me held a purpose.
That longing that was broken that day lived on inside me for years. I was ashamed of how much I wanted to cling to it. So many days of my life I would linger… lost over this hurting want. I was afraid to tell anybody, afraid of this thing that felt like my biggest weakness. I tried so many ways to make it go away and the more I tried the more it seemed to grow stronger. It showed up in dreams more often than I wanted anyone to know. Often I criticized myself for it. Often I tried to silence it, but it was there, very present in the depths of my heart, yearning. And in a way I felt like a prisoner to this piece of me that I had no idea what to do with.
I was a wife. I was a mother. Stuck inside in a secret prison.
Slowly, the secret comes out in waves because it simply has too. When you can only fall down inside, all you can do is look at your mess. Coming acknowledgement… to myself, to God. Terrified acknowledgement to Nano, to friends. And the moments that feel so terribly exposed with people, places that feel so painful and dark to go through… they bring so much struggle, yet they find ways in time to join hands with this sense of growing freedom through the journey.
Like waves it finds this heart in me. Waves of freedom, and waves of feeling stuck and hidden and ashamed again. They say faith is messy and is like a flame that blazes and flickers. Maybe faith is receiving the blaze over and over again from the blazing One, learning more and more, for the seven thousandth time, how to accept God’s grace for the flicker that’s barely there, because I am always forgetting.
Still, another flicker. Still another stuck place. And still, God is faithful.
Nearly seven years after that first ache of my broken longing, with three babies to love on… there was feeling more stuck in my own ashamed weakness than I ever could recall. And suddenly, in the middle of it, I found myself up above the world on a careflight with my baby boy. He was lying in front of me and I was scared, shocked, confused. They said he was in kidney failure, on the verge of brain failure. We were headed to spend the next eight days in the hospital where we would fight fear and he would fight to recover. Six months old.
Through a long week of heart-cries, confused tears, and smiles slow in coming, he did recover. His brain never was damaged. His kidneys were whole again. All was well, once again, and we were so very grateful.
Towards the end of that eight-day stay, the door of our hospital room opened and when I looked up… I was eighteen again.
There in the doorway was that old longing I never knew what to do with. What came through that door was a lot of hope that I needed. A lot of hope that I am known by a God who is watching every little thing that is happening inside the depths of my own heart.
For seven years of ache that could feel so shameful, for seven years of struggling with this thing in my heart that I could never find a way to manage, God knew. In that moment, what I knew is that God sees me.
It would be a few weeks before Nano and I sat long in our home with our anticipated guest. And there that day, that burning ache inside me found the home it didn’t see coming.
That broken place inside me was made right that day. And it was given a “home.” It wasn’t anything I had imagined, but what I realize is that it allowed my own yearning to find its shape. A place it could live in and thrive in. And the broken things found purpose, beginning with that conversation.
Reminiscing in the quiet after those healing hours, I checked my phone and saw the date. It was May 28th… And it hit me.
The dates were the same. May 28th was the day this longing was broken. That was the day I wrote it all down in my journal with tears. And May 28th, exactly seven years later, was the day God made a way.
In seven years to the day, God pieced this one broken longing in me together and gave it a home.
It didn’t look like what I had first thought I longed for. But it gave fulfillment to the root of that very longing just the same.
God gave me what I longed for, not as I first hoped. No, He gave it in the way and in the time that He knew it would be the most beautifully orchestrated blessing.
And I can’t know the ways of God but if He had not allowed this thing inside of my heart to be broken, then I don’t know how there would have been a way for Him to give it back to me in the most perfect timing, with a home for it that is more beautiful than anything I had imagined.
What I know is that my God is a Shepherd, watching over every ache inside the heart of every one of His sheep. And He delights in proving to us just how much He knows about us and the scary steps we take. And just how much He cares.
The longer He shepherds us, the more He proves to us that there is nothing we can do to mess this up. For everything inside us that can fret over how to manage our own hearts, over the steps we have made and the steps we have yet to make, He promises that He is holding each step His beloved lambs take and He has the whole story covered.
These inward parts of us that feel so unmanageable to us, they are never in the way of what God is doing. He formed our inward parts while we were still in the womb… forming each heart into a vessel that could showcase the beauty of His grace in a way the world has never seen it before.
We can take our next step knowing we are a work of God. And we know full well that His works are wonderful. We remember and we carry forward with the joy of knowing where our help comes from.
“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Psalm 121:1-2.
The same God who formed the hills freely gives His promise to form our story.
Whether we step right or left, the banner on our hearts will remain as constant as our Savior. As sure as there is a soul within us that calls it’s Lord again, it is certain wherever we go: He will not let our foot be moved.
God is with us.
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