The word for the day on Saturday was the Welsh word hiraeth, meaning a deep longing for something, especially one’s home. How deep our longings can be for comfort, peace, and hope. Perhaps because it’s winter, those longings seem particularly intense for me these days. Longing for winter to end, for dining outside to return, for gardening. 

My dreams in the third-season-of-life often take me back to the past, to places where I no longer belong. I have no desire to return to those past seasons in life. Which begs the question: what am I really longing for? 

Longing for His Home

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. Psalm 42:1 NIV

The psalmist expresses deep personal longing and spiritual thirst. The tone is one of desperate need for survival, profound loneliness, and isolation. The contrasting desire is for rescue and comfort. This change comes to those whose souls long for what God offers: His Kingdom.

As nineteenth-century pastor, theologian, and author Andrew Murray wrote in The Kingdom of God is Within You: “…there are hearts in whom the longing has been wakened for something better, and who would gladly know what it is to enter the Kingdom.” 

In His Home.

Longing for His Word

My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times. Psalm 119:20 NIV

Being a rule-following perfectionist often consumes me with intense longing to know God’s laws, judgments, and wisdom. As with this psalmist, I hunger to understand His Word and am consumed by efforts to align myself with His perfect will. The problem is that it’s often my will that guides me rather than His.

Andrew Murray reminds us: “God is. God is near. God is love, longing to communicate Himself to me. God the Almighty One, who worketh all in all, is even now waiting to work in me, and make Himself known.”

In His Word. 

Longing for His Grace

For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things. Psalm 107:9 ESV

Only God provides spiritual, emotional, and physical fulfillment to so those seek Him. He is my refuge; He satisfies my longing.

Again, Andrew Murray: “When we see the God who has promised, in His infinite love… longing to enter into us, and be all that as God He can be, we shall understand how our place is simply to rest in what He will do, to claim His great gift of the Spirit who brings the Kingdom into us, and to wait in patient dependence for Him to do His mighty work.” 

In His Grace.

With deep longing in the cold bleakness of winter, I pray these psalms.

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