Longing

M. Robert Mulholland, Jr., writes in “Invitation to a Journey”:

I once heard a woman tell of her struggle with this reality. Her mother was a prostitute, and she was the accidental byproduct of her mother's occupation. Her life's pilgrimage had brought her to faith in Christ, blessed her with a deeply Christian husband and beautiful children, and given her a life of love and stability. But she was obsessed with the need to find out who her father was. This obsession was affecting her marriage, her family, and her life.

She told how one day she was standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes, with tears of anguish and frustration running down her face into the dishwater. In her agony, she cried out, "Oh, God, who is my father?" Then, she said, she heard a voice saying to her, "I am your father."

The voice was so real she turned to see who had come into the kitchen, but there was no one there. Again, the voice came, "I am your father, and I have always been your father."

In that moment she knew a profound scriptural reality. She came to know that deeper than the "accident" of her conception was the eternal purpose of a loving God, who had spoken her forth into being before the foundation of the world.

Tori Petersen grew up in the foster care system where she absorbed a message that she was worthless. Although the rules were strict, she was allowed to go to church which gave some relief from a sterile group-home environment. She writes:

The pastor’s messages about forgiveness gave me the first stirrings of hope I could remember. I even asked Jesus into my heart, though I didn’t understand what that entailed. I only went up to the altar because I thought that I’d find relief from the pain of foster care and the continual sense of feeling unwanted.

As she moved through a succession of foster homes, her heart grew increasingly callous toward God and other people. Her peers would poke fun at her, saying she had “daddy issues.” At the time, Tori “believed having a father would solve lots of my problems. Perhaps someone would have been there to love me. If God was so good, I couldn’t help wondering, then why hadn’t he granted me a father?”

During many lunch periods, she enjoyed secluding herself in the English teacher’s classroom. For one of her art classes, she received permission to paint a mural on his wall. While she painted, they talked. He never shied away from a good debate or hard questions.

Tori said, “One day he asked if I believed in God. I replied that I didn’t. From my perspective, it seemed like people claimed belief in God due to social consensus more than any genuine faith.” I asked, “If most people in society didn’t believe in God, would people still believe in God?”

He paused for a long time, and then responded, “I don’t know.” She appreciated his candor, which was rare among the Christians she had known. Instead of telling her what (and how) to believe, he admitted he didn’t have all the answers.

My teacher’s honest admission of uncertainty encouraged me to start asking more questions, because deep in my heart I was searching for the Father I’d always yearned for. My heart was so drawn to the character of Jesus that I posted a YouTube video asking people to forgive me for being a mean and angry person.

Around the same time, a youth leader she’d barely seen since junior high reentered her life. She began asking her and her foster mom questions about God, which they answered patiently and kindly. Tori said, “The one question I couldn’t shake revolved around innocent children: If God is so good, then why do they suffer? All they could answer was, ‘I don’t know.’”

I didn’t know either. But I did know that when I looked at Scripture, I saw a God who didn’t shy away from pain but embraced it so that others would know love. And when I looked at the lives of those who most reminded me of Jesus, I could see how they had sacrificed on my behalf. I didn’t want to waste their suffering, or my own, but I wanted to receive it all as a gift—as a call to love others as they had loved me.

My salvation did not happen in a single grand moment, but through small miracles that gradually chipped away at the scales of skepticism. I saw God more clearly the more time I spent around people who pursued godliness, who told me who I was in Christ despite what I’d done and what had been done to me.

In the end, the father I’d always wanted turned out to be the Father who was always there, the Father who revealed himself to me in his own perfect timing.

While working in India, Doctor Paul Brand, who pioneered the modern treatment of leprosy, once laid his hand on a patient's shoulder. Then, through a translator, Brand informed the man about the treatment that lay ahead. To his surprise, the man began to shake with muffled sobs.

Doctor Brand asked his translator, “Have I done something wrong?” The translator quizzed the patient and reported, “No, doctor. He says he is crying because you put your hand around his shoulder. Until you came here, no one had touched him for many years.”

Conventional wisdom surrounding the function of taste buds focuses on five essential types of flavor sensations: sweet, salty, savory, sour and bitter. To that list, scientists have added a sixth taste—starchy.

Professor Joyun Lim from Oregon State University, explains the justification for the recent addition. Lim's team of researchers found volunteers who could identify starch-like tastes in various carb solutions, even after being administered a solution that blocked the taste of sweetness. Lim said, "Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It's like eating flour."

Of course, starch has yet to be completely enshrined in the proverbial Hall of Taste. Food scientists insist that primary tastes be recognizable, have identifiable taste receptors on the tongue, and trigger a useful physiological response.

Lim and other scientists are working on finding those taste receptors, but for useful physiology, one need look no further than elite athletes. There's a reason why bodybuilders, distance runners, and basketball players all use terms like "carbing up" or "carb loading" to describe their culinary habits. The cliché is true—the body knows what it wants.

Potential preaching angles: To hunger and thirst after righteousness, we must recognize its taste, God's wisdom is evident in creation through cravings that track our bodily needs

A Craiglist ad gained internet fame after a group of friends in their twenties posted a request for a "generic" dad to barbecue burgers and hot dogs at an outdoor party. The ad listed several "dad-like" activities as desirable, including "grilling hamburgers and hotdogs … refer[ing] to all attendees as 'Big Guy,' 'Chief,' 'Sport,' 'Champ,' etc." and "talk[ing] about dad things, like lawnmowers, building your own deck, Jimmy Buffet, etc." Additional requirements included a minimum of 18 years' experience as a father, 10 years' experience grilling, and a preferred name of Bill, Randy, or Dave. After the ad went viral, the group of organizers said that their new hope was to have Bill Murray respond to the ad.

Potential Preaching Angles: Our perfect heavenly Father is anything but "generic," and always stands ready to respond to the needs and desires of his children.

Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology and the scientific adviser for Pixar's film Inside Out, claims that human touch is the "the foundations of human relationships." He explains, "Skin to skin, parent to child, touch is the social language of our social life … The foundation of all human relationship is touch. There are four years of touch exchanged between mother and baby … In the social realm, our social awareness is profoundly tactile."

Keltner was one of the co-authors for a study that looked at "celebratory touches" of pro basketball players, including "fist bumps, high-fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles." The researchers discovered that teams who players touched one another a lot did better than those teams whose players didn't. Keltner has concluded that touch lowers stress, builds morale, and produces triumphs—a chest bump instructs us in cooperation, a half-hug in compassion.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, singer-songwriter-guitarist J. Tillman (now known as "Father John Misty") was asked: "You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you?"

Misty responded, "I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone's eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, 'God's always been.' For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque."

Misty was then asked: Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? Misty replied, "I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There's something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem."

In the summer of 2012, Sage Stallone, the 36-year-old son of actor Sylvester Stallone, died suddenly of a heart attack. Shortly after Sage's death, his dad told People magazine, "It's very, very tough. It's a horrible situation, but time hopefully will heal, and you try to get through it."

In 2016 The New York Times featured an article on Sylvester Stallone's role as an aging Rocky in the film Creed. The article noted that when production began, the actor was "still paralyzed by the devastation of losing [Sage]." Stallone said, "You just feel responsible. That you weren't there. Here you save all these fictitious people, and you can't even save your son."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Control; Death; Easter; Grief—In the same way, we cannot control the power of death, but Christ has defeated death. (2) Christ, death of—God the Father and God the Son were in perfect control, and yet God the Father chose to not to save his only Son for our sake.

"I don't believe in God, but I miss him."

This is the opening line from a book titled Nothing to Be Afraid Of by the award-winning British writer, Julian Barnes. Barnes, who describes himself as an agnostic, writes, "I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life." And yet this agnostic intellectual still feels haunted by the beauty of Christian art and music and by what he calls the "wake up call to morality."

In July 2014 a panel of scientists from NASA announced that they're convinced they will soon find life outside planet Earth. One NASA scientist said, "We believe we're very, very close in terms of technology and science to actually finding [another Earth-like planet] and … signs of life on another world." According to this panel, we will find extraterrestrial life within 20 years, going as far as to say that the estimate is a "conservative" one.

NASA outlined its plan to search for alien life and said it would launch the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite in 2017. The agency predicts that as many as 100 million worlds in the Milky Way galaxy may be home to alien life.

At the announcement, Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said, "Just imagine the moment when we find potential signatures of life. Imagine the moment when the world wakes up and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over—the possibility we're no longer alone in the universe." NASA astronomer Kevin Hand seconded Mountain's opinion, saying that in the near future "we will find out we are not alone in the universe."

Possible Preaching Angles: Christians could endorse this search for life on other planets, but not to end our "long loneliness in time and space" or to "find out we are not alone in the universe."

Joyce Carol Oates, an American novelist, and her husband, Raymond Smith, also a writer, met while attending graduate school in 1960. They got married and spent 47 years side by side. In 2008 Smith entered a hospital with pneumonia, and it took his life. His death was sudden, before his wife could get to him.

In her memoir, A Widow's Story, Oates describes how she went through her husband's things following his death and discovered an unfinished novel. In the notes for this work, she found when he was in a hospital prior to their marriage and he fell in love with a fellow patient. To Oates' surprise, she also discovered that a psychiatrist had diagnosed her husband's condition by calling him a "love-starved" individual. She was shocked and even disillusioned. She had been close to her husband for years and never knew that he was starved for love. Oates wrote, "It should not fill me with unease to learn this, after Ray's death, and so many years after it happened. But he hadn't told me! It was his secret. He'd been 'love-starved'" (emphasis mine).

Isn't that an accurate description for all of us? Everyone has a need, a hunger and even a craving for love, and when it isn't found, we become "love-starved." As Oates said elsewhere in one of her short stories, "Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat."

Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows both our hunger for God's love, the hole in our hearts that only Christ can fill, and our hunger for human connection and community.

In 1986, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan and his 14-year-old brother were searching the streets for spare change in their home city of Berhanpur, India. Saroo's older brother Guddu wandered beyond the station and Saroo fell asleep waiting for his brother's return. A few hours later, Saroo woke up 1,500 kilometers away, in Calcutta, eons away from his home and family. He survived on the streets for weeks, was taken into an orphanage, and was adopted by an Australian family and grew up in Hobart, Tasmania.

Twenty-six years later, he found his way back to his hometown with the help of Google Earth. An article explained Saroo's journey back home:

In 2011, using vague memories and Google Earth imagery, Saroo identified his home town. Using the ruler feature in Google Earth, he mapped out a search radius by making an educated guess about how far he traveled by train. After countless hours of scouring this area of Google Earth imagery, he came upon a proverbial needle in a haystack. Saroo spotted one vague landmark that led him to the next, helping him unlock a five-year-old child's memories. He eventually spotted a neighborhood, street, and tin roof that looked familiar.

In Saroo's words, "It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, 'Does this match?' And when you say, 'No,' you keep on going and going and going."

In 2012, Saroo embarked on a trip from Australia back to India. Once he arrived, he shared his story with locals, who helped him find his way back home to his mother and surviving brother and sister. Twenty-six years after accidentally leaving home, he finally found his way back.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Search for home; Longing; Seekers; Spirituality—After Eden, we all have a hunger to find our true home in our Father's love. (2) God's Word; the Bible—God's Word is our "GPS" to lead us home. (3) God's grace; Lostness—It doesn't matter where life has taken you. There's always a way back home. You may not know all the steps to take back to God; just open your heart to him and he will guide you home.

In an interview with NPR, former Beatles star Paul McCartney said:

It seems to me that no matter how famous [you are], no matter how accomplished or how many awards you get, you're always still thinking there's somebody out there who's better than you. I'm often reading a magazine and hearing about someone's new record and I think, "Oh, boy, that's gonna be better than me." It's a very common thing.

The interviewer then asked, "But, Sir Paul McCartney: You have had success in so many dimensions of music. You really feel a competitive insecurity with somebody else that's coming out with a record?" McCartney replied: "Unfortunately, yes … I should be able to look at my accolades and go, 'Come on, Paul. That's enough.' But there's still this little voice in the back of my brain that goes, 'No, no, no. You could do better. This person over here is excelling. Try harder!' It still can be a little bit intimidating."

The usually crass comedian Louis C.K. offered some insightful comments about our soul-numbing addiction to technology. On Late Night with Conan O'Brien he said:

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'Oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it …

C.K. then shared a story about the time he was in his car listening to a Bruce Springsteen song ("Jungleland") that made him really sad:

And I go, "Oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write 'hi' to like 50 people." Then I said, "You know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck." The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or [sex] or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.

In a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, rock legend Bruce Springsteen said that his broken relationship with his father lives on in his songs. For example, in the song, "Adam Raised a Cain," the younger Springsteen sings about the father who "walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames." The songs were a way of talking to his silent and distant father. Springsteen said,

My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn't really have a conversation with him. I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain't the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered.

The past, though, is anything but past. Bruce Springsteen admitted his yearning for what he calls "Daaaddy!"

My parents' struggles, it's the subject of my life. It's the thing that eats at me and always will …. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose …. [The musician] T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about "Daaaddy!" It's one embarrassing scream of "Daaaddy!"

Then gesturing toward the band onstage, he said, "We're repairmen—repairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, I'll repair a little of you. That's the job."

Editor's Note: Like this illustration, sometimes a good sermon illustration raises a challenging issue or question that the sermon must address.

The 1963 non-fiction book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is often credited as a catalyst to the modern feminism movement in the U.S. In essence, the book examined the general state of unhappiness of many middle-class American women. According to Friedan's research, a comfortable, predictable suburban life didn't give women the fulfillment they were expecting.

The first chapter of her book, titled "The Problem that Has No Name," raised a question that resonated with many women across the nation:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Women; Women in Ministry; Spiritual Gifts—Namely, women have so much more to offer the church and the world than just making beds, matching slipcovers, and chauffeuring kids to activities.

In 1977 NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to explore the galaxy. A golden record called The Sounds of Earth was affixed to each of the twin spacecrafts—a message from earth to anyone out there in the universe who might be listening. It contained both music and the sound of a human heartbeat.

Over thirty years later, Annie Druyan, who served as the creative director of NASA's famous Voyager Interstellar Message (VIM) Project, reflected on what she chose to include in The Sounds of Earth:

The first thing I found myself thinking of was a piece by Beethoven from Opus 130, something called the Cavatina Movement … When I [first] heard this piece of music … I thought … Beethoven, how can I ever repay you? What can I ever do for you that would be commensurate with what you've just given me? And so, as soon as [my colleague] said, "[This message is] going to last a thousand million years," I thought of … this great, beautiful, sad piece of music, on which Beethoven had written in the margin … the word sehnsucht, which is German for "longing." Part of what we wanted to capture in the Voyager message was this great longing we feel.

So in the end, NASA chose a great song of human longing and launched it into space. It's as if NASA's scientists were saying to the rest of the universe: "This is who and what we are as human beings: creatures of longing." And hidden in that basic "introduction to who we are" there are implicit questions for possible extraterrestrials: Do you feel this too? Are we the only ones? Are we crazy?

Possible Preaching Angles: Human Longings and Christ's Satisfaction—This story not only points to our deep longing for meaning, beauty, and wholeness. It can also illustrate our need for the only One who can satisfy these deep longings—Christ.