This is the call, the cry of a soul longing for something, but it seems just out of the reach of my fingertips. I know that my first love is God, that His will for my life is what I need to sustain me. For He fills me daily, He daily gives me enough time, energy, want, love, grace, peace, each day. He gives me all that I could ever need and yet I still find my soul longing for more, something more…
All my life I have been a fighter, a fighter for people, for relationships. I fight for my friends, for my family, for those I care and love dearly. I do this through encouraging, through acts of service, through prayer, and through spending time with them. I love and give and fight for them. I care even when it may seem that I am quiet…but, sometimes it is through the silent fighting that the most work is being done.
Yet my heart wants someone to do the same for me. It longs each day for someone to say that they care for me. It searches for the person who might step up when I may be too weak. Yet each day I continually feel abandoned, broken and in the corner. Even though I am able to pull it all together, to stay strong through the loneliness it doesn’t mean that I don’t need that love from someone, that fight from someone.
I was struck with the realization that God created me to love as he loves, to give my love without condition, to give fully and completely, to love those who need it, to fight for those who don’t want it, to those who feel like they don’t deserve to be loved. I realized that He created me to understand that the things that I am longing for and wanting; those are the cries of His Heart too. These things that He has planted in my heart, is Him screaming out to the broken world.
He is saying come fight for me, come love me, come and desire me!
But, the thing about God is that he doesn’t just call those things out to us. He calls them out and then helps us. He sees our efforts, He sees when we are struggling, and yet still He is the one there right beside you and me without any second hesitation.
What if we fought for God the way that we desire, want and sometimes do fight for each other? What if we decided to put down the wants that we are longing for and pick up the the desires of God’s heart? Because I bet you if we were to fight for our relationship with God as we fight for our human relationships, that there would be a shift in our wanting to be fought for by people to a longing to just be with God.
Even though we don’t always feel God, His presence is always there. For even in the silences in my life when I have clung to God, He has reassured me that emotionalism is not the same as spiritual maturity. What really counts is how much I love, rely on, and believe in Him. God can be our silent warrior, for in those silent times, through the silent fighting that is where the most work is being done. It’s up to me then to choose and accept the fighting being done for me, or to run in the opposite direction.
God is longing for us to fight for him, just as we are longing for anyone to fight for us.
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”
As C.S. Lewis asked, I ask you too, what other answer would suffice?
