Desire: Longing For God in the Aches of Our Hearts

This article was first written for and published by BreakPoint.

The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for…

– Catechism of the Catholic Church

When I was a kid, the day after Christmas sent me into an existential crisis. When I was in high-school, I felt a loneliness I’ve never forgotten. When I was in college, I fell in love but that love was not returned. And at some point in my twenties, when the pressures of adulthood mounted, I grieved the loss of youth.

Longing. Desire. If there’s one subject discussed more than any other in my office as a therapist and pastor, it’s this. My clients and parishioners don’t use these words, exactly, but you can hear it in their stories:

“I wish my Dad had been a different man.” 

“I wish she would marry me.” 

“I wish I didn’t have to feel this grief.” 

“I wish God would tell me why.” 

“I wish I could find work that makes me happy.”

I can remember my own awakening to desire and longing in college, when I heard for the first time Saint Augustine’s line: “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” Not long after, I read this from C.S. Lewis:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Longing. It’s that ache in the belly felt by every human being at some point in life. It’s as unavoidable as growing old. And perhaps, for precisely this reason, rather than ignoring it, denying it, demonizing it, or giving into it undiscerningly, we should pay attention to it. According to John Eldredge (who has done much work on this topic), “How you handle your heart’s desire will in great measure determine what becomes of your life.”

Perhaps not knowing what else to do with my own longing, I wrote a song about it. Here’s the lyric of the chorus:

All our longings- they’re like sacred signs. And they point us to the God behind them all. That’s why sadness, and every sweet romance- that’s why sunsets always make us homesick.

“Homesick” is a song, a story, about two people who confront their longing and find, underneath it, a holy fire, God’s fingerprints.

The man in verse one has a sex addiction. He is drowning in shame. What if he could know that, lurking beneath his depravity is actually a longing for intimacy, placed there by God, pure, innocent, beautiful, and full of dignity?

The woman in verse two has lived, faithfully, in a lifeless marriage. Her attention to the longing in her heart for a better marriage or a different marriage is an act of faith. Romantic desire says, “Leave.” But God-given desire says, “Stay. Let your longing be an act of faith to the God who hates divorce.”

And so, her tears become tears of faith. Who knows, maybe God will fulfill her longing but, in the meantime, I imagine Him wrapping His arms around His brave, grieving daughter. She has confronted the very desire that He gave her and released it back to Him.

All our longings- they’re like sacred signs. And they point us to the God behind them all. That’s why laughter, and every moonlight kiss- that’s why silence always makes us homesick.

“Homesick” was a difficult song to write. My goal in writing it was to deepen my own awareness of the truth that, beneath the depravity of my human nature- beneath the loneliness, beneath the unrequited love, beneath it all- is a God-given dignity, one that, when finally restored, will be nothing less than the divine destiny for which I was created. Don’t hate your desire. Bring it to Jesus and let him refine it or fulfill it.

The Chaos Of Christmas

This article was first written for and published by BreakPoint.

Have you ever noticed how in the Christmas movies that they always seem to involve Christmas in chaos? For Charlie Brown, it’s commercialism. For George Bailey, it’s financial ruin. For Chevy Chase, it’s cousin Eddie and a violent, loose, squirrel.

Vanity Fair observed a few years ago out that it was Ralphie with his Red Ryder BB Gun and dysfunctional family in 1983 that upended the sentimental old order of Christmas movies by showing something every family could recognize, but I think the connection between chaos and Christmas goes back earlier than that . . . way earlier.

Songwriter Andrew Peterson describes the chaos poignantly:

It was not a silent night. There was blood on the ground. 

You could hear a woman cry in the alley ways that night 

on the streets of David’s town. 

And the stable wasn’t clean. The cobblestones were cold. 

And little Mary full of grace with tears upon her face, 

had no mother’s hand to hold.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, the chaos of the very first Christmas included a shameful public scandal, frightening visits from other-worldly messengers, a harrowing escape from a maniacal and murderous politician, and a birthing room would have made Motel 6 look like a resort.

Matthew tells us, “When Mary had been engaged to Joseph, before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit…”

It’s easy to read this story and forget that, for Joseph, as it would be for any unsuspecting husband in the months before his honeymoon, the news of Mary’s pregnancy meant betrayal at the deepest level. It meant, most likely, the loss of his future plans- a life together with Mary and whatever family they may have had. It also meant the end of a mutual financial arrangement between the couple’s two families.

Matthew goes on: “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” 

More than just a story of personal betrayal, this unplanned (and inexplicable) pregnancy before marriage meant, in those days and in that culture, almost the certain punishment of death for Mary. Scholars point out that Joseph would have been within his rights according to contemporary customs to turn Mary in and let her face this punishment.

Are you feeling the “Christmas spirit” yet?

The chaos keeps coming:

An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife…She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

In other words, God is asking Joseph to let go of what most men in that culture valued most: the continuation of one’s own family lineage through the natural birth and naming of a firstborn son.

Joseph’s chaos included losing this dream, too.

On the third Sunday of Advent each year, my church prays a famous prayer used by Christians in worship since the 700s A.D.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us . . .

When I think of the chaos of Mary and Joseph’s Christmas, and our own, I’m tempted to qualify the petition with something like:

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us . . .  but not with a job loss, Lord! Don’t come among us with that. And please don’t come among us with a trip to the hospital or a family argument…

The Church has long pointed to Joseph as a model Christian father, and rightly so, because Saint Matthew concludes Joseph’s story like this:

When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him…

In other words, instead of quietly dismissing Mary, which could have been Joseph’s otherwise reasonable attempt to avoid the chaos, suffering, and disruption, he obeyed God.

Maybe the reason we all connect with the chaos of Christmas specials is because they shine a light on the fundamental- but unsentimental- truth that our salvation appeared with suffering, that divinity arrived with disruption, and that Christmas came, all those years ago, in the midst of chaos.

This year, instead of quietly dismissing the chaos, suffering, and disruptions, what if we engaged it with faith and obedience, trusting that God’s disruptive activity in our lives will lead, like it did for Joseph, to the welcoming of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

A few years ago, I recorded an arrangement of Joy to The World that sought to capture the juxtaposition of the joy and chaos of Christmas. You can check it out below.

Christ In My Heart, in My Mind, in Ten Thousand Places

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST WRITTEN FOR AND PUBLISHED BY BREAKPOINT.

As a kid in church I remember singing, ad nauseam, “I’ve got that joy, joy, joy… where? Down in my heart.” So, one day I prayed that Jesus Christ would come into my life, but then I wondered where he would live. And my childlike theology answered, “Oh, right. Down in my heart.”

As I grew to an adolescent, I asked a Sunday School teacher how I would know God’s will for my life, particularly the important things like whether I should date Lindsay, from the 9th grade, and he told me, “Pray and you’ll know in your heart what God wants you to do.”

Now, it’s easy to poke fun at this kind of thinking, but this focus on my heart as an essential and precious lesson for any young Christian. It is a lesson evangelicalism teaches well in its songs, prayers, preaching, and culture. It’s one I’m grateful to have learned.

Unfortunately, in my context, this lesson was matched with an equal disinterest in anything outside of my heart. The physical stuff around me, for example, was apparently going to hell in a hand-basket, and Christians were just a-passin’ through this world on our way to heaven. We learned that if we turned our eyes on Jesus, the things of earth would “grow strangely dim.”

In other words, by age ten, I was a Christian with a more or less Gnostic understanding of the Christian faith. As I saw it then, my relationship with God belonged to the spiritual, not the physical, world.

Christ In My Mind

Eight years later, I attended a Christian college where I was introduced to Christian thinkers like C.S. Lewis, John Piper, and the Westminster Divines. I experienced a new (and needed) lesson about faith that A.W. Tozer sums up well in his often-quoted line, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

Majoring in Bible, I took courses on epistemology and theological method, and participated in late-night dorm room discussions on the Five Points of Calvinism. It was invigorating and fresh and I was happy to be exercising these new “muscles” in the mental gymnastics of theology. In fact, this brave, new, intellectual world of Christianity gave my faith a new lease on life, especially since my typically tumultuous adolescent experience had left me cynical of my “heart.”

By the time I got to seminary my heart loved Jesus, and my mind wanted to know Him, but the rest of me, and the rest of the world, was still nowhere to be found in my faith. The gnostic dualism of physical against spiritual was very much alive.

Christ In Ten Thousand Places

Near the end of seminary, I read the late Eugene Peterson’s book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. The book’s words deeply impacted me. Peterson took his title from this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

[To hear a great conversation between Eugene Peterson and Ken Myers about Peterson’s book, go here.]

Also, around this time, I began visiting churches whose liturgies reflected the more embodied theology and practices of the ancient Church. The sensory experiences of liturgical worship matched what I had learned from Peterson: Jesus Christ is not just in my heart and mind; He’s in my body, and in ten thousand other physical places in this world, “Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” Wasn’t this the point of His incarnation?

Altogether, this meant that, finally, for the first time in my Christian life, the existence of the physical world was no longer extra, or mundane, or some kind of danger to my spiritual life. Instead, I realized, it was sacramental, full of the grace and meaning given to it by Christ’s incarnation! All water suddenly became a reminder of my baptism. All bread and all wine were now reminders that God became man to make all things- visible and invisible- new.

In the end, my journey of discovering Christ in ten thousand places found its way into a song. You can hear it below.

Count The Stars: Hope

This article was first written for and published by BreakPoint.

One clear night, I went camping with friends on the banks of the Chickamauga Lake, just down the street from my house when I was a teenager in Tennessee. About one or two in the morning we put a canoe in the water and rowed out into the middle of the lake 150 yards from shore, until our campfire became a tiny dot of orange on the sand.

There, in the middle of the lake, surrounded by darkness and the sound of water splashing up against our canoe, we’d lay back and stare in awe at the millions of stars above our heads, stars that were only visible to us because of the blue, purple, and black darkness of the night sky.

Little-known poet, Sarah Williams, wrote, “I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.” My song, “Count the Stars,” is a song about this: being too fond of the stars to be afraid of the night. It’s a song about being too fond of God’s promise to surrender to my doubt, too fond of Christian hope to surrender to despair.

“Count the Stars” was written a number of years ago for my church as we studied the darkness, doubt, despair – and hope – of Abraham and Sarah from the book of Genesis. Theirs is a heartbreaking story of infertility, but also one whose promise of hope was declared in the stars lighting the darkness.

Astute Bible readers will note that the entire biblical narrative hangs on whether or not God blesses them with a son. Only through Abraham’s lineage do we get the Messiah. Only through the Messiah do you and I get grafted in to Abraham’s family. In other words, there is a sense in which weare some of the stars God told Abraham to count in Genesis 15!

Back at church, during the sermon series, some close friends of ours were, like Abraham and Sarah, struggling with infertility. Our community watched as Paul and Jessica longed for a child month after month. Amidst the tearful conversations and processing we had with Paul and Jess, one truth hit me the hardest: the emptiness of Jess’ womb was not the worst part of the pain.

The worst part was the hope required of Paul and Jess to continue coming to church, to continue praying, to keep rejoicing with every new expecting mom in our church, and to keep trying – again and again – for a child of their own. Hope was the hardest part.

Hope, according to philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, is absurd, senseless, and stupid; especially religious hope. “Hope,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

People with religious hope, Camus said, are like the character of Sisyphusfrom Greek Mythology, a man sentenced by the gods to roll a rock up a hill everyday only to have it tumble back down once he reached the top.

But, their “hope” is not our hope.

Abraham and Sarah’s story in Genesis is paradigmatic of God’s hope-filled way of doing things in the Scriptures. Their story asks us to read the Bible through a kind of hermeneutic of hope.

God seems drawn to human emptiness like a moth to a flame, anxious to fill the widow’s jar with oil, the barren wombs with life, the darkness with light, the wedding jars of Cana with wine, the bellies of the crowds with loaves and fish, and the tomb with resurrection. Against the backdrop of human doubt, God’s glory, like the stars, shines brightest.

May the same be true for us –  that we would see God’s glory, especially in the Promised One, Jesus Christ, shining brighter than our dreams for ourselves.

The Gospel Coalition #TGC19 Playlist

A couple of the hymns I recorded for Come Away From Rush & Hurry made it onto a great playlist the Gospel Coalition put together as a soundtrack to their conference. You can check out the entire playlist here:

Really glad these hymns, “Blest Are The Pure In Heart” and “At The Cross Her Vigil Keeping” are getting some exposure. They have blessed me tremendously. The first time I heard “At The Cross…” was during Lent. We prayed each verse of the hymn in between the Stations of the Cross liturgy. It was as beautiful as it was haunting.

“Blest Are…” is certainly a memorable text but it was the melody that first lodged in my heart and mind. I heard this gem a few years ago for the first time.

Anyway, I’m so grateful to be included on a playlist like this, with so many artists I both listen to and admire. I hope you’ll enjoy and share the playlist on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever you get your tunes!

Here’s the playlist/article from TGC’s website.

JB

Worship & Liturgy: An Interview With The Stone Table Podcast

Podcasting with @baylife_cc about the different traditions of Christian worship and how I love them all...

52 Likes, 0 Comments - Josh Bales (@joshbalesmusic) on Instagram: "Podcasting with @baylife_cc about the different traditions of Christian worship and how I love them..."

Recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend, Travis, to talk about Christian worship in all of its variety. It was so. much. fun. You can hear the interview below- and then get more from The Stone Table Podcast- HERE.

LISTEN…

A Song For Eugene Peterson

When I was in seminary I read Eugene Peterson’s book “Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places” and it deeply impacted me. Peterson took this title from this poem, written by Hopkins.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

As songwriters tend to do, I gathered up these influences, digested them over a period of weeks, and spit them back out in a song.

I played it last week, at a Clergy Conference, the morning after Eugene died. It was a special thing to be able to offer this song because the speaker for our conference was author and professor, James K.A. Smith, who speaks and writes a great deal on themes of incarnational theology, embodiment, and the like.

I heard @JoshBalesMusic sing this song, "Ten Thousand Places," at an Episcopal clergy conference today--a moving tribute to the life and ministry of Eugene Peterson. https://t.co/j5dHAXKkqE via @YouTube

— James K.A. Smith (@james_ka_smith) October 24, 2018

You can listen and download it for free right here!