Longing

If you have the poetic temperament, you go on groping toward something which will express all this . . . and our own inarticulateness only hastens the final heart attack.³⁰ 

White’s “groping toward something,” of deep calling to deep, C. S. Lewis called sehnsucht, a German word meaning longing or desire. In the autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes the flood of feelings that overtook him as a student when he read a book of Norse mythology. He writes, “And with that plunge back into my past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country.”³¹ 

At the core was his understanding that there was something more than earthly existence. As Lewis expressed it, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”³² “Sehnsucht is a feeling of nostalgia that faces towards the future,” observes blogger Daniel Motley.³³ 

Motley explains that Lewis’s feeling was “a permanent sense of longing that characterized his deepest held beliefs about Christianity.”³⁴ Desires “for love, safety, security, belonging—are never truly satisfied here in this life . . . Like the ‘forward- facing nostalgia’ of sehnsucht, this feeling points us toward the heavenly home for which we were created.”³⁵ 

God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccl. 3:11). We yearn with a wordless song in our deepest souls for something bigger, more lasting, than the thing we want most in this life. That yearning is met in the love of God through Jesus Christ. Through Him we find restoration, purpose, and hope for eternity. Knowing Him satisfies all our yearnings. 

“He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things” (Ps. 107:9).
Prayer: Lord, You see the longing in my heart. Fill me.