Walking with God by John Eldredge is an amazing book. The workbook makes it a wonderful experience to walk through the book…pondering, praying, considering, asking God, learning to listen.
He brings up many truths that penetrate. God has used it to bring home once again things that he has been wanting me to wrap my brain around.
In his entry called “Unmet Longings” he says:
To bury the deep longings of our hearts is not a good thing. Doing so begins to shut our hearts down and then we fall into that “get on with life” mentality. For me, that means bearing down and working. Getting things done. But my passion slowly fades away, and life recedes from me. I cannot bring to my work the zest I once did, so even my work suffers. Because my heart is suffering. It’s like a form of slow starvation. If your body doesn’t get what it needs, you can run for a while without it. But slowly the erosion begins to manifest itself. You get tired, your muscles ache, or you start having headaches or a thousand other symptoms. You need nourishment.
The heart is like that. Thank God, we cannot force it down forever. Hurting, it begins to insist on some attention. Now we can either listen to these rumblings and let our hearts surface so that we bring them to God, or we can give in to some addiction. The starving heart won’t be ignored forever. Some promise of life comes along and boom–we find ourselves in the kitchen closet taking down a quart of ice cream…
Walking With God page 185
This reminds me of what the Hallidays said in Silent Hunger, also published as Thin Again and Get Thin Stay Thin. Our hearts are hungry. It is a silent hunger, but it longs to be heard, recognized, and satisfied. If we don’t listen to it, if we don’t feed it in an appropriate way, it will raise its head and demand feeding…and we may throw it some “bone”… sooner or later, we must bring it to God. We must sit with the emptiness and wait on the Lord.
This is a common theme in my life right now. To be willing to wait. Wait. Wait…Wait on the Lord.
Often, God even awakens the desire in our hearts…so that we might recognize it is there…more on that tomorrow…
