THE LONGING TO BELONG

 

“Jesus Christ came to accomplish the great at-one-ment, not the great alone-ment. He came to overcome our separation from God and from one another. He seeks to bring us to His Father, to himself, and to each other, at one, through the gift of His Atonement.

“The natural yearning to belong eternally to close friends and family also includes a longing for an eternal relationship with God…..at times we feel an emotional or spiritual hunger, a kind of psychic emptiness. We wander to and fro, trying to satisfy this intuitive craving, which Robert Browning called “the passionate longing of the heart for fulness”

“The good news is that the gospel of Jesus Christ answers the heart’s longing for fulness. The Father of our spirits knows where we belong – where our core being can say, “I was made for this”. To that end, God would have us fulfil our deepest eternal yearnings and know the meaning of our very existence.

“The knowledge that we are literal, spirit children of God also reveals a stirring source of our attraction to him – the genetic-like link between ourselves and our Father in Heaven. We share with Jesus Christ the common heritage that God is the literal father of our spirit body, the substance that clothes our eternal essence or intelligence.

“Just as we carry certain genetic receptors that draw us to our parents and our children, we also carry some kind of spiritual genetic coding that is literally a part of the Father himself.

“Given the likelihood of that nearly incomprehensible tie, no wonder we long for God. Yet no matter how much of his Spirit we have, it may never be enough to satisfy fully our longing to draw closer to him. Perhaps that eternal fulness is possible only when we are permanently reunited with Him.”

-          Elder Bruce C. Hafen, “The Belonging Heart”, p 3-15

I see all you think and do

I see your longing and what you feel

Follow your heart and come unto me

That I might your Saviour be.

 

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”  (John 14:6)

- CATHRYNE ALLEN

(Art: Guiding Light by Ivan Guaderrama)