Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12
What is your deepest longing?
For me, what I longed for the most was to belong.
My longing to belong
I longed to be loved, cared for, and cherished. I longed to matter. With all my heart and soul, I longed to belong—to God, to my family, to friends. To someone.
As an extremely shy child, I usually felt left out. I didn’t know how to reach out to others to play or comfort, nor did I know how to recognize ore receive anyone else’s efforts to reach out to me. I had playmates as a child, but I felt more than we were just play companions than we were friends.
I eventually grew out of most of the shyness—but my longing to belong grew even deeper. My premarital sexual activity wasn’t a search for love as much as it was a search for belonging. I thought sex was the way to matter to someone.
When I married Big Guy, I thought I would finally feel like I belonged—to him, and to our marriage. When that didn’t seem to happen, I blamed him. It never occurred to me to look at myself as part of the problem.
The walls I placed between us were a seemingly insurmountable barrier to belonging, though. In being inauthentic and incomplete with him, I was unable to believe that his love was for the real me.
I didn’t realize at the time that I was the creator of the biggest barrier to belonging.
I began to lose hope that I would ever have my longing to belong fulfilled.
My longing fulfilled
As God helped me knock down the walls that had gotten in the way of sex, I discovered that those walls had been keeping out some of the things for which I had been searching. The barriers preventing me from receiving love and acceptance from my husband evaporated. These same barriers had gotten in my way with God, too (from my side, not from His).
Sex became a more regular part of our marriage, without the tension or resistance we’d experienced for years. Our sense of oneness grew. Seeds of belonging were planted and nurtured.
Two years after I’d begun to work on sex, Big Guy turned to me during the afterglow of a lovely and loving sexual encounter. “I feel more married than I’ve ever felt before,” he said. I realized that I, too, felt very married. I thought, Now I know what oneness feels like.
It was the moment when I first knew—deep in my heart and soul—that I belonged. I belonged to my husband, and I belonged to God. It was such a sweet moment for me.
Your deepest longing
What is the deepest longing in your heart?
Consider whether there is anything you do—or don’t do—that gets in the way of what you most deeply desire.
Is it possible that you are the creator of a barrier in having that longing fulfilled? Is there a change you could make—in yourself, or in your words or actions with your husband—that might begin to dissolve that barrier?
Proverbs 13:19 tells us that a longing fulfilled is sweet to the soul.
It is sweet, indeed.
Related posts
- The Wall: Keeping Myself Emotionally Safe
- When the Wall Becomes a Prison . . . Forgive
- Tear Down the Wall
- The Other Side of the Wall
- Intimacy: No Longer Alone
- Tear Down the Wall
Image credit | Daria-Yakovleva at pixabay.com
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What a beautiful thing for your husband to say! I just wanted to tear up. 😉
That was exactly my response at the time. 🙂