This is the second part of my previous musings about awe, the first of which you can find here.

……………………

part two

The sky tonight is such a deep, pure blue. There’s a lone star next to the moon; these two are the first to arrive to the fete of the evening. It’s wintry chill outside, and still. It’s a night when I almost could change colour loyalties, it’s that beautiful.

There is something about blue, something wistful and sweet. It’s wholly placid. Wistful is one of my favourite words, because so often it describes how I feel: “full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy,” “pensive,” “musingly sad” (www.merriam-webster.com). It’s not that I’m depressed – far from it. I just oftentimes feel this longing inside, for more, for wholeness, for something greater. It’s difficult to express in words, but since I’ve started writing about it, I suppose I have a certain degree of responsibility to do so.

What’s this longing for? I can’t think of any way to put it except that I feel a yearning for eternity. Nothing earthly can completely satisfy me. Nothing. I’m not necessarily only talking about money or popularity, although I hear the more of those sort of things you have, the more you want. I’m referring to things like success, or health, or relationships, or career, or food… or love. Of course, a milieu of all these things together can make one quite content, for the most part. But is it enough? I say no. Why? Because there are stars out there. There are unvisited lands. There are people who need love. There is eternity.

Sometimes I’m so filled with joy that I feel I might burst. In those moments, I am absolutely content. And still, there’s a longing. Because in those moments, I’m so close to what I think eternity must be like (eternity for those who know Christ and whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life). Moments with no troubles, no tears of sadness. Moments of sweet, simple freedom and peace. In those moments, sometimes I’m the most wistful of all.

Similar to Psyche in Til We Have Faces by Lewis, though perhaps less extreme:

“I have always … had a kind of longing for death … It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when other birds of its kind are flying home.”

I wrote a poem one night after driving through the mountains at sunset. Over the space of two hours I felt such an intense and sincere longing as I gazed out the window at rivers, green fields, rocky mountains, and all the glorious colours of evening. I felt this longing to fly, to continue over every next hill and peak to see what was beyond. A longing to be in the sunset, with its colours swirling around me in wholeness and light.

We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature…is still soaked with the sense of exile.

  (Tolkien)

But we have taught ourselves how to hush this longing when it whispers to our hearts. We decide we just feel close to nature or in-tune with something grand and vague, or we determine how to regain control of things. This is how we often respond to awe when we encounter it.

Because the uncontrollable isn’t safe. It’s too great. And God is too awesome for us. Too powerful.

But, wait, Reader. Because when we surrender to His holiness and acknowledge our weakness and dirt, and let ourselves be washed by His grace, then He gives us His powerfulness and He puts His same Spirit in us. He still isn’t manipulatable or touchable. Or safe.

But I don’t want safe. I want good.

………………

How, then, shall we be?

In awe.

.