Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in GodSample

Longing for God

As the world has become a more complex place, the longing for a simple, yet transformative, Christian experience has grown with it.

The world longs for God.

No one is without this divine ache—whether they realize it or not. Humanity was built to be dependent on the operating system of Divine Communion, and when the world becomes louder and more vitriolic, the ache for that communion only increases. We thirst for God, “in a dry and parched land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

God isn’t merely a good idea or a meal ticket to an eternal banquet. He is the very essence and origin of pleasure, goodness, excitement, adventure, joy, and wonder. Not just because we find those things in what He gives us, but because we find those things in God Himself.

Prayer is a word we use to broadly name the many ways we seek to satisfy our holy longing. We were created to feel God in our bones like this. To live in the wide-eyed wonder of a life caught up and surrounded by Him.

Yet often it can feel like life with God, and prayer, is hard, dry work. If prayer is the road on which we travel to God, then a crisis of prayer is also a crisis for our God-ache. If the longing is for the soul’s deep thirst to be satisfied, then theology, cultural analysis, or revived church community is not enough. We need God Himself. We need to rediscover how to know Him.

Knowledge alone can’t change us. We can go to church for decades, serve in missions teams, pastor and preach even, and yet find ourselves at the end of it all depleted, unsure, not feeling as if we know the God we offer others.

French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is credited for saying, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Prayer can be an endless sea. A place of adventure and wonder, something you can’t live without because it’s so deeply satisfying. Because God is deeply satisfying.

Prayer is about becoming beholders.

How would you describe your current experience of prayer? How has your awareness of your longing for God changed in recent years?