Have you ever grown discontented and didn’t know why?
You couldn’t quite put your finger on the reason your mood darkened or you suddenly felt constrained, uncomfortable, itchy for something. I sure have.
Often this odd annoyance occurs well before change knocks on the heart’s door or peeks in through the window of our thoughts.
It’s as if God needs us to listen before the message arrives, so He wrinkles our starched shirts, so we’ll feel itchy and awkward inside.
We search under layer after layer of emotional bedding in hopes of finding the tiny pea of irritation.
As the dissatisfaction intensifies, we begin looking outside of ourselves; scouring the horizon for a scapegoat we can blame for the sourness in our souls: a neglectful partner, an annoying friend, a political decision.
I’ve experienced this reoccurring cycle more times than I can remember, let alone count, so you’d think I’d know the drill and stop to listen. Yet every time the rustling of change happens inside my soul, I search in all the wrong places among all the wrong people until my will has sufficiently exhausted itself.
Then the message comes:
- A whisper of insight in the night…
- An awakened excitement for an art form…
- A serendipitous encounter with someone…
- A path or purpose never before considered…
Yes, destiny sweeps us along and into the change God intends, and our soul settles until the next gale blows.
All that matters is being alone with Him…consumed by Him…one with Him. And if we open the door and let our Lord in, we find a face and form that misses us more than we could humanly comprehend.
In A Burden Shared, author David Roper expresses this mystery of God drawing us into communion with Him:
“And so He calls to me—His depths to mine. Deep within God and within me, it seems, there is a place for just the two of us, and without that fellowship we both ache in loneliness and emptiness…The idea that my longing is actually His voice calling—that idea alone—has changed the way I look at my quiet moments with God.”
Yes, discontentment is our friend—the unseen tug on the heart woes us to respond to the One who is longing to be one with us. Those flurries of change might at first ice the heart but if we bend back our head in child-like fashion and open wide our tongue, we will catch snowflakes of grace. We will experience our Lord’s longing for something new He wants to stir inside of us. And that something new just might be spending time alone in His presence so He can fill our loneliness with His love.
JoDee Luna Art 