A Desperate Longing

I took a class called Spiritual Formation, and in it we read a part of a book by this monk from the twelfth century. It was a Song of Solomon type of description of our relationship with God. He talked about a bride and a bridegroom and how on the wedding day the whole goal is to get everyone else out so that the two can be alone with one another. And how even a moment that the lover has to spend away from her beloved is torture. He went into a bit more detail and used some more colorful and descriptive language, but that was the gist of it. Then he said that that was the kind of relationship we needed to have with God not on a physical level, but on a spiritual level.

That got me thinking about the fact that it is very rare to find someone with that kind of passion for God. Rarely are we in a place where our greatest desire is to get away from everyone else so that we can be alone with God. Psalm 42:1-2 talks about longing for God and thirsting for Him...that signifies a desperation that we don't have individually or as a body. The Psalmist asks "When? When can I meet with God?" That's desperate...we don't ask when we can be with someone we just kind of like...we ask "When?" when we really want to be with someone, because we are madly in love with them. That got me thinking about being obedient. I think we find it so hard to be obedient to God and we struggle with perpetual sin because we don't really love Him like we should. He says that His commands are not burdensome and that if we love Him, we will obey His commands. I think His commands are burdensome, because we don't really love Him. On a human level, we will do anything our beloved asks of us. We can't wait to do things to express our love to them, to serve them, to submit to them, to be led by them, and to please them. And this is all because we really love them. But for some reason, even though we are consistently and passionately pursued and wooed by our true Prince...we can't love Him in the way we can those on earth. We can't bring ourselves to the point where He is all consuming and His commands are not burdensome. And that makes me very sad for myself, for the church, and especially for my generation as more and more of us fall through the cracks and into the world.