Denver Seminary

ENGAGE 21 My heart, rent, objected vociferously; It's not supposed to be this way. Grief was with me that day. Anger, too. But something else, also: an ache, a longing, a desire. Quiet, dwarfed by its louder sibling emotions. It's the same ache I get when I read the morning news, or when injustice goes unanswered. It's the ache I feel when I hear Pachbel's "Canon in D," or stand barefoot in the sand on Laguna Beach, looking out on the Pacific. It's the ache I feel when I summit a 14er, or when I'm struck by a riot of colors on an autumn day's walk. It's the ache I felt the day they put my daughters in my arms. It's a longing for something just out of reach. A homesickness for a place I've never been or seen. It's as though I'm haunted by heaven. Germans have a word for this longing, this desire for something we cannot quite define. They call it sehnsucht, which is often translated as "yearning" or "longing," but has no exact equivalent in another language. Sehnsucht figured prominently in the work of C. S. Lewis, who described it as an "inconsolable longing" for "we know not what." Lewis believed that if we find in ourselves a desire for which no experience in the world can satisfy, then we must be meant for another world. In the prelude to his book, Renovation of the Heart, a cornerstone book on the nature and process of spiritual formation, Dallas Willard points out that this desire not only allows us to peer in on "another world and another life," but it also gives us a glimpse of what we can pull from that world into the world of the here and now. Willard says the New Testament fleshes out what is possible in this life: that our life can be like "rivers of living water" (John 7:38) and that we will "be able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine" (Eph. 3:19–20). Willard argues that few Christians grab hold of these promises because of the distance we see between our life and the life described in the New Testament, and because we don't approach life in the right way. "The perceived distance and difficulty," Willard writes, "of entering fully into the divine world and its life is due entirely to our failure to understand that 'the way in' is the way of pervasive inner transformation and to our failure to take the small steps that quietly and certainly lead to it." It's a longing for something just out of reach. A homesickness for a place I've never been or seen. Sometimes it seems the darkness is winning. When what divides us vastly outweighs that which unites us. When corruption remains unchecked. When leaders are unprincipled. When children go without food, shelter, or happy homes. When we lose our jobs, our homes, our hope. When marriages break down and loved ones die. But the Resurrection is a promise that no matter how black the night or intense the grief, there is a place free of death and decay, a place we see now only in the corner of our eye—the heaven we're haunted by. Halee Gray Scott, PhD DIRECTOR OF THE YOUNG ADULT INITIATIVE Halee Gray Scott, PhD, is the director of the Young Adult Initiative at Denver Seminary. She is also an author and independent social researcher who focuses on issues related to leadership and spiritual formation. Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Washington Post, Christian Education Journal, Real Clear Religion, Relevant, Books & Culture, Outcomes, and Intervarsity's The Well. She authored Dare Mighty Things: Mapping the Challenges of Leadership for Christian Women (Zondervan, 2014) and is currently at work on her second book which explores how men and women can lead well together in a post-#metoo culture.

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