Longing Awakened

I awoke this morning with a deep longing for the things of God and to be with this Lover so true. I love Him. I love His kingdom, and I am taken in wholly by His pursuit. Jesus is doing in me what Antoine de Saint-Exupery once talked about: "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

Half-dead I awaken
from a restless slumber,
from a stiff, still, dead-sea sleep,
into a longing like a fierce wild wind
that carries me
off on some dangerous course.
The storm to fill these sails
and full-force propels
this heart also rages the ocean plain
of too-long-waiting waves
that have forgotten themselves
under the dry spell
of the hot sun,
now stretching into a weathered agony.
Come, north wind! And blow, south wind!
Bring the scent of some scandalous rain
and burst open the sky
stretched tight
to break forth in glorious might
upon this lean and weary one.
Let this hunger for the deep
and endless immensity of the sea
glut in me
the virile tides
until, dead from living,
I arrive.
©2005, Brian Fidler

Incidentally, I wrote this shortly before I found out that a dear friend was killed in a car crash that very morning. This is for you, Burton, a man who did, indeed, finally arrive. So close to home is the evidence that this life is to be lived as a holy longing "like some fierce wild wind," and that the storm kicked up by such deep-hearted desire by both ourselves and our Creator whose image we bare will both propel us Homeward and wash away everything else we could ever hope to hold. In the words of Dougie MacLean, "And the lightning strikes and the wind cuts cold through the sailor's bones through the sailor's soul, till there's nothing left that he can hold, except a rolling ocean..."