Restless Heart Syndrome

I’ve spent the last several nights restless, up at the early morning hours. I wrote this in my journal:

It's early in the morning, too early to be hammering away at the keyboard, but I haven't been able to sleep yet. I am restless and aching with longing and desire. I just finished watching an episode of Man Versus Wild on the Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls taught me how to survive my time in the Moab Desert if ever I find myself there with only a knife, a flint, and a canteen. It was intriguing, and the contrast between battling on the edge of survival and all it means -- eating raw raven's eggs, swimming underneath a debris field in deep cavernous water, fighting against Pygmy rattlers for sleeping shelter -- felt piercing when compared to my surroundings laden with empty boxes of carry-out pizza, a heating blanket with its controls sitting on my nightstand next to my cell phone (oh, who's call did I miss?), and a fluffy, cozy bed. I'm drawn into the exploration and adventure coming through the TV screen.

Keeping as quiet as possible so as not to wake my wife, I tiptoed to the office and turned on a small reading lamp and pulled one of my journals from the shelf and flipped randomly to an entry from a little over a year ago. I wrote it days before journeying to Colorado to attend a retreat geared toward helping a group of men discover the deep calling and passion placed within our hearts by the Father (Psalm 139). Here are highlights from that entry:

"...I keep wanting to act on the world instead of having the world act on
me. I want something real and relevant and holy to come from within me
like a spring gushing up instead of standing out waiting for the promise of rain
by elusive and swift-moving storms. I want to pour out to the degree in
which I am filled up... ...I answered a email questionnaire that asked ‘'What
did you want to be when you grew up?' My response is pointed, 'A pioneer
of some sort, leading the world into some new way of living.' Everything I
ever wanted to be or do comes from that, from an astronaut to a musician to a
speaker to an actor to a scientist. Exploration. Discovery.
Expression...

"...This is what I would love for Jesus to do for me this week in Colorado,
to say to me something of my true heart and calling, to commission me, to speak
into me as One who knows, and knows deeply. To say to me something in the
same way He spoke into Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that fateful
and bright morn, 'Then (because you do love me), feed my sheep.'

And this is my desire still on this morning a year distant, a year further along on the journey Homeward. Frederick Beuchener said that in whatever other "official" way God may speak to us through the church and Scripture and such, surely He is also speaking through what happens to us, through the events of our lives. I feel this to be an important moment, full of holy ache and mystery, my heart itself becoming in some sense a wild bit of bush burning without being consumed.