Longing to RETURN

The list simply grows and grows.

Three weeks into The Challenge, one of the most delightful results of the whole effort now poses a challenge of its own. I have too many sites I want to return to on a regular basis to fit into the blogging hours of the day! After years of solitary posting, this new community of like-minded friends calls to me repeatedly and insistently to come and play. I give in to visit “just one more” before heading off to accomplish another task on my to-do list, promising myself the reward of another one once the less pleasant job is done. Visiting competes with writing for my blogging attention on a regular basis now.

Part of the draw is the traveling of my own heart as it skips from blog to blog. Two days ago it went back to family vacations at Disneyland as my sister penned her “People Watching” post from a conference she was attending there (Musings from Dot). A day earlier my new blogging buddy Tammy (HeartString Quilts) took me back to my days of living on the west coast in her “Oregon” post. And early on in the Challenge fellow music lover Horst (Tangents) filled my memory with melodies I love in his “Classical Music” post. My mind stops to visit and my heart goes along for the ride.

Heart travels were therefore already on my mind last evening when a flesh-and-blood new friend visiting our home for the first time talked about the places his had been lately. He noted that when he was in full pursuit of the presence of God in his life, things had been going well for him. Since he had turned his attention elsewhere, his life had nose-dived into a downward spiral. He was simply longing to return to a spot where he once found peace and comfort, joy and rest.

Places of the heart call to us all, and whether we attempt to identify those longings with people or places or particular moments in our past, they eventually can be traced to a God-shaped longing to return to Love we once knew. The Bible says that even Creation groans to be reunited with its Maker at His return, and neither can we as part of that Creation escape the pull of our heavenly heartstrings. The longer we live, the more strongly they draw us, until the tent-pegs that keep us grounded in this physical reality are pulled at the moment of our death, and our spirits can finally wing their way Home.

“That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.”
(Romans 8:18-21 TM)