“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”  ~ Saint Augustine

A theme that we will be exploring this year is the idea of spirituality as our longing for more. We are weary soujourners and this world is not our home. We all desire more peace, more security, more happiness, more connection, the list could go on. While learning to accept the reality of this broken world is important, it’s also important to accept our deep human longing for more, because this longing is ultimately a desire for God and an invitation to know him.

Seems helpful to be aware of these desires, then yeah? However, I've encountered how easy it is for my narratives around how I'm feeling to mask the desires I'm actually feeling. So today I want to talk about navigating our narratives so that we can attend to our longing for more.

In the last several months I’ve become increasingly aware of how the narratives I believe about myself have a dramatic impact on how I behave and how I feel about myself. For instance, I consistently feel like a failure and that I could be so much more than I am right now. In response to this, close friends, family members, and counselors have all told me the same thing: “You’re too hard on yourself!” Despite this consistent feedback, my heart refuses a “majority rules” system and maintains its belief that my narrative is correct, I suck.

While I haven’t been able to banish this narrative from my heart and mind, I’ve increasingly been able to acknowledge it as only one narrative among many. Realizing this, I’ve been able to listen to what it has to say, but I don’t have to accept it as the sole narrative about myself.

Once I've been able to do this, I notice that the narratives about myself are separate from the desires I have. So, I can ask the question, “What’s going on here? What do I actually want?” To the best of my self-understanding right now, the desire that lies at the core of my negative narrative is the desire for perfection, for everything to be made right. This is a deeply ingrained desire in my heart that I can't uproot (nor should I!), but I can learn to take that desire to Jesus for fulfillment, rather than trying to do it myself.

Gaining an awareness of this cycle has been really helpful for me, but it so often goes unchecked in my life. Rather than my desires driving me towards God, my negative narratives keep my attention on myself and I isolate because I feel ashamed.

My prayer in unpacking how our narratives interact with our desires is that we'd be better able to articulate our desires and see how they point us to God. We stand a much better chance at taking fruitful steps of faith when our action is inspired by an "I want to..." rather than a narrative of "I should/must/need to..."

[[name]], today may your heart find its rest in your savior.

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