I miss You Father,
More than I can tell.
I long to come home to Your embrace,
I want to be free from
This harsh and lonely place.
Are You missing ME, Father?
And do You long for MY embrace?
Or do all the hosts of heaven
Fill my empty space?
I want to be the daughter
Like the Son that He was,
I follow, I follow,
Leaving behind all my earthly sorrow.
-
CATHRYNE
ALLEN
(Artist Unknown)
“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)
I
am facing Christ Day alone this year. I experienced this in 2022. Circumstances
dictated I would have no family, friends, gifts or festivities to focus on.
I
was ok with it. In fact, I looked forward to it resolving it would be the most
spiritual Christmas of all: Church, intense study of the Saviour’s life,
listening to Handel’s Messiah, watching Passion of the Christ. I was going to
have the greatest connection to the Saviour yet.
Christmas
Day came and found me in bed sick with a heavy head cold, too sick and
unmotivated to carry out my good intentions. My aloneness and the state of
being, however, gave me more insight than all the planned inspiration that
never eventuated.
As
I faced the day alone without any distractions, a vista of Christ’s life
presented itself to my mind from the humble and unceremonious birth to the
horror of Golgotha and Calvary, and in between I saw….loneliness.
This
is what I came to understand: the lonely road that the Saviour travelled whilst
here would have been fraught with longing for what He had left
behind…….something nobody else could understand with their mortal, finite
minds.
Even
though some believed Him to be the Son of God and supported Him, they would
never have understood what it meant to leave His throne; they would have never
understood the glimpses He had into eternal worlds He could not speak of; they
would have never related to the higher ground He stood on; and they would never
have grasped the agony awaiting Him.
In
short, the Saviour travelled a lonely road. One, in fact, paved with many
tears. It is true that once He had full knowledge of who He was, He would have
had Father’s comforting spirit and the company of angels, nevertheless, these
moments of reprieve must have made His feelings of isolation even more acute
once they were withdrawn. The thought that comes to mind: so close, yet so far.
I
do know one thing. The Saviour would have yearned for His true home whilst He
walked this primitive earth. He would have yearned for the constant presence of
the Father He so loved. The eternal life with Him that awaited Him would have
been more of a reality to Him than mortality.
When
we come to the stage in our lives where this world becomes less of a ‘reality’
and the prospect of the eternal becomes what is more real, we get a glimpse of
the Saviour’s mortal life. This is the point where the longing for the Father’s
presence sets in.
It
is the moment to live for, because then we leave the world behind do everything
necessary to make it back home. We abandon sin and we seek Christ’s living
water that gives us life and power of endurance. We abandon the enticing lustre
of this world and yearn for the God who awaits us…..
Did you miss Your godly robes
That you traded for
The swaddling cloths of Calvary?
Was the ground rough beneath
Your feet as You traversed
The dust of Galilee?
The baseness of This earth,
So willingly suffered despite
hostility.
Yet, You came:
The Father to reveal
And to Him forever
Our yielding hearts to seal.
- CATHRYNE ALLEN
(Art: Jerusalem O Jerusalem by Greg Olsen)
