burning like a million stars

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.."

-Psyche (Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, C.S. Lewis)

The Lord is so good. Sometimes I'm just overwhelmed thinking about who He is - how beautiful everything He makes is, how beautiful His promises are, how unshakable His love is. I can't wait until the day when I get to go to Heaven and squeal and jump and run with all my might into His presence (sidenote: my housemates and I had a pretty great conversation about this actually, involving us reenacting a dramatic rom-com-like moment of throwing our hands out and screaming as highly pitched as possible at our first sight of Jesus. It was kind of funny. I bet God chuckled).

I've been learning to pray something simple but transformational. And I like to pray it in the small moments, like when I'm walking to class, or eating lunch, or about to make a phone call. I pray, "Lord, grant me the increasing desire to be near to you." Because as I've prayed that in the small moments, I find that in the larger ones, when I am hurting or frustrated or unable to care about people or anxious, there is this longing that overpowers my circumstance. It is the longing to be with our loving, Almighty Father.

And nearness to Him means nearness to what is true. It means the certainty of love. It means the comfort that I am taken care of. It means freedom from oppression. It means the ability to interact with compassion. It means strength to walk forward. It means joy in abundance.

And I desire all of those things...more and more of them, too. Don't you?