Five Minute Friday :: Longing

dreams from Summer 2000

The days and the summer nights
Berries from the brambles and the vines
Yearning for a future still not yet
Recalling how to dream…

• Five Minute Friday :: Longing Linkup and major congrats to Kate on another book!


From about a year ago, here's one place I wrote about:

• Home is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace

Home, yearning, longing, belonging form a familiar and familial group. What can I say about longing today?

A person feels longing in their gut, in their heart, throughout their body. It's visceral. It's organic. It's powerful and it's often noticeable to outsiders.

As I explained:

Home is a spacious place. Space to breathe, to reach out, to grow, and to dream. A location and a people who take away my lostness, who help deliver me, because they delight in me.

My scripture reference was, "God brought me out into a spacious place; God delivered me because God delighted in me." Psalm 18:19

Finally I wondered,

Can home be in a place of blight, broken glass, fragile dreams, when there were any dreams at all? What name would we give that place? Is that the kind of situation we need to be rescued from? God would rescue us from?

Longing for Home is a buzz phrase—if ever there was one. Other longings and yearnings include hankering after lost connections with people, objects, experiences, and broader, larger places. Yet those individuals, those experiences and artifacts, that wider broader city or countryside all are components of home.

Longing is for something or someone you've had in the past but that's missing now. You can't long for what you haven't known or experienced. Or can you?

Longing and yearning can be visceral. Sometimes they're vascular. What happens if the longing ends because the object of our yearning has arrived? It's in the house!

As the phrase goes, "I'm so old" I remember everything about Tuesday 11 September 2001, a.k.a. 911. Even before then, I remember the hope many of us felt with the arrival of a new century called Y2K. My header collage illustrates the summer of 2000. I still love Y2K fashion. I remember the excitement of my first internet endeavor—an urban space in the old MSN groups. You can look back. I can reminisce. But yesterday's gone.

I remind myself, "Pray – remember – dream." Pray about now. Remember then. Dream about the future God is preparing to bring your longings home.

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