My Soul Longs

In my fragments, the scenes from those commercials intermingle with nostalgia of what I miss from childhood.  The jigsaw puzzle of memories looks something like this…

The haze of a late spring sun, set high in the sky, casts a dizzying glow of luster over everything it touches. Just beyond the golden display, shadows of restful shade shelter underneath sprawling oaks. Their branches are laden heavy now with sprouts and buds of newly birthed life.  A white picket fence in need of repair hides her age gracefully with lush emerald ivy interlacing her wooden slats. She perfectly outlines the yard stretching herself out wide in both directions, soaking up all the glory of golden hour.

I see cut watermelon warm from the sun dripping its sweetness down from the tabletop onto the broken earth underneath the table. Water sprinklers propel cascading arches across the lawn, rhythmically dancing back and forth as if in a slow-motion ballet. In their spritzing mist, the air passing through falls a few refreshing degrees.

Those breezy bursts swim across the scene and occasionally brush against sun kissed cheeks. Little ones who have been running stop and grin in pure joy at the coolness against their skin.  A red and white gingham tablecloth faded from the sun of many former days just like this one stretches out over a wooden picnic table. Lemonade freshly mixed quenches the thirsty passerby, stopping from play.  

Dampened blankets of grass blades spring back up as quickly as they lay down after bare feet pass over them. A wave of fragrant honeysuckle lavishes its simple glory on all those it befalls. 

Oh, and of course the Smuckers grape jelly jar sits with top open on the table next to a loaf of Sunbeam bread and a peanut butter jar, ready to be enjoyed with that glass of lemonade.

Just for a moment, allow deep breaths in.  Slow breaths exhale out. And again.  Pause and drink in the sweetness of it all.  Can you see it in your mind?  

A whimsical chorus of voices from every kind of bird imaginable sing to one another, or maybe to the world, or perhaps to their creator. In the foreground, echoes of buzzing wings play like stringed instruments in a tiny bluegrass band. Whistles and chirps, coos and crackles delight every deep part of the soul.  If you stop to hear, you will feel their joy. And only if you stop to see, you will become part of their world for just a moment.  To pause and breathe, while once second nature in childhood, now in adulthood requires intentionality.  If you aren’t intentional, it all eludes you and your day won’t include any of the glories that nature offers.

I breathe it all in. Even now, my mind covets distant memories from the days of my youth.  Even if all the remembrance isn’t one single core memory all within the same experience, it is a summary.  

Those Smuckers and Country Time commercials represent a season in my life.  The memories bring comfort.  Warmth of a summer day, as well as the scent of freshly cut grass and dusty dirt roads or the feel of dampened mud in between my toes all ground me back to the earth. I sit on my porch sofa comfortably remembering.  And while right now I can hear and smell and savor all of nature just beyond the stoop of my porch, I close my eyes and remember a different time.  

My soul longs.  

My soul longs for the simplicity and yet the incredible complexity of creation that frames so many recovered memories from childhood. My soul longs for days free of distraction, clear of brain fog and mind clutter and distance.  Oh Lord, the clutter is so much and so deep so many of my days. My soul longs for quieting peace and stillness and simple joy.  I long to hear a whisper from God – whispers heard in my spirit that I don’t have to revalidate again and again.  Lord, was that really you?  Did you really say…? Instead, these whispers are heard and received, because I am still enough for long enough to listen not with my ears, but with my spirit.  

I need more moments of gratitude where I am overcome with the beauty around me. The creation around me exists in perfect harmony day after day from sunrise until its setting in the sky again.  I want to be more often overcome by the beauty I also see in the people around me.  The gift that others offer, the value that God has placed in them, the purpose they are meant to live can escape me if I’m not intentional to look for it.  It is all around me, all this simple beauty.  Every time I really stop to look, searching it out with spiritual eyes, I find it.  

We are always longing, never satisfied.  Our appetites for more and next and surprises are always hungry. We don’t find these things often in the mundane and the monotony of the traditional workday.  So we search out the extraordinary, sometimes even the drama, to shake us into believing we are a star in our own lives. If it’s not the next project project we are waiting for, it’s an event, a weekend, a vacation, a healing, or a closure.  It is the next – whatever the next may be.

We are always waiting and watching and expectant for the next. The next time, then I will be satisfied; then I will be assured, or complete, mature, seen, recognized, accomplished…the list is endless.  I think about how often I’ve been getting by the Monday through the Friday to make it to the weekend.  Living for the weekend. All the while, missing so much goodness and joy in the long gap between – the slow moments, the still moments, all that’s sweet and wholesome. Am I grasping it in all the busyness? 

This is the human condition to some degree, and I know that. I know that I’m not exempt from it. Acknowledging it just now, however opens up my spiritual eyes.  It gives me a bird’s eye view, as they say.  I don’t really care for most cliches, but this one really seems to stick here. I’m looking from above, down into my whirlwind as I fly over it.  Peering down into messes and anxiety, I see the cycle.  And my perspective changes as I see it from above and separate myself for just a moment, so I am not in the midst of it, but disconnected.

My observation of all then asks the questions…

Are we really that different from all the generations before us; as in, do we really have it harder?  Is our culture really different from all those before ours?

Our benchmark is the generations that we can see, those closest to us – the ones we can remember, those we read about in the decades just before our own, and generally those in our own country. Our tunnel vision sometimes distorts our worldview.  We see the generations of Americans that have lived just before us.  They are most like us, so we compare our culture most closely to theirs, forgetting how big the globe is, forgetting how many people groups have lived and existed before our own.  We are so self-centric that we make our plight harder and greater in comparison to so many others.

Is sin and evil really darker now?  Do we really have more information than ever before?  Are we really multitasking more than any people group that has lived on this planet before us? 

When I wonder at all the reasons I can’t find the stillness or clear through the brain fog that clouds my mind so many days, I have been inclined to answer yes to all these questions.  

What has been, is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.  Is there a thing of which it is said, “see this is new?”  It has been already in the ages before us.  

There is nothing new under the sun.

Those are not my words. See https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1%3A9-10&version=ESV

These words were written somewhere around 900ish BC.  Their author, King Solomon was declared by God to be the wisest man who had ever been on the earthbefore and will ever be after him.  So, I’m inclined to hold his words in high esteem.

Everything is on repeat, according to Solomon. We aren’t as special as we’d like to imagine.  We don’t have it harder than we’d like to believe. Our ideas aren’t more profound than those before us.  Our distractions are just different. Technology is just different.  

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Ecclesiastes%201%3A18

The more you know…

Solomon lamented in the book of Ecclesiastes that much wisdom is vexing.  It is troublesome.  I would add wisdom brings more responsibility and holds one accountable.  The more you know, the more you are accountable to do good.  The more you know about the world, the more sorrow you will also feel –lots and lots of sorrow over evil.

And how much we know these days!  Wow. The internet has made it so that at any moment in time, I can know what political leaders are doing in their personal time, whether honorable or not; what parents have viciously done to the children in their care; or just how much so much of humanity devalues one another.  And does it ever bring sorrow to my heart.

The more we have access to know, the more we can choose to fill our minds with so much information at rocket speeds.   Even if it doesn’t stick into our long-term memory, still it deposits details here and there in the recesses and it clutters up and fills space that could be used more wisely.  I give my thoughts over to so many things that are complete wastes of time.  And why?  And how do I stop the addiction?  Because, after all, isn’t that what it really is?

Just because I can know truckloads of information, should I?  

Remember, I said my soul longs for stillness – which is exactly the reason I’ve been having recurring visions lately of slow, undistracted days of summer that washed over me as a child like a warm blanket for my soul.  So many days now, that stillness is so difficult to find.

Is my culture wholly to blame?  

I don’t think so.  I know it’s not actually.

I choose.  We all choose.  Day after day, we choose what we know, what we set before our eyes; every single thing we ingest into our spirits is a hard choice.  Mostly.

Remembering Solomon’s wise observation that there is nothing new under the sun, I also fast forward to some of Paul’s words written in a letter to his friend Timothy, both disciples of Jesus.  Paul could be considered the father of the Christian faith to me and you.  Much of what he wrote, as God inspired him, we hold as the scripture of the new testament of the bible.  He told us that in the latter days, which are the days leading up to Jesus coming back to earth, that evil would become more prevalent.  While Solomon is correct that there is no new thing under the sun or on earth, so are Paul’s that some things would come more in bucketloads.  

Is life harder in our time because we bear more than generations before us, or just different because we have more access to more information?  

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.  For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Timothy%203&version=ESV

All of the attributes that Paul mention here are roots.  The branches that grow out of these are the things we see in our culture now (but have always been in different degrees throughout time) – those branches can look like the wealthy exploiting the poor, children never launching and living with parents long after they are able to support themselves, prevalent sexual assault and murders, theft and increasing crime, children being abused, or people concerned more with social influence than real spiritual influence.  

Because of our rocket speed internet, we ingest the stories day after day, taking in more information about the world around us than other people groups before us. It is true that we have more access to it all, so it appears that we have it way worse.

I think this drives us to believe that the world is too bad, it’s too far gone and there is nothing we can do to break the cycle of being so overwhelmed. We begin to believe that we simply can’t simplify, reduce the clutter and enjoy simple joys. We are much too busy and there isn’t anything we can do to change it.

So, is that the truth?  

Jesus said, come to me – all you who are heavy and burdened, and I will give you rest.  

How do we come to him?  How do we find that rest?  I mean really practically lived out?

A good restart tomorrow may look this way – I reach for my phone to turn off the alarm.  And then I set it down.  I don’t pick it back up to read an email, a news story or the Facebook feed.

Before I get dressed for work, I talk to Jesus.  I ask him to be the master of my day.  On the way to the office, I turn off the radio, music stream or podcast.  Then I ride in the silence and think about the really important things.  I pray for those people who I’ve told that I would and even those who haven’t asked, because I saw the pain or anxiety in their eyes the day before.  When I get to work, I don’t stop for multiple breaks to scroll through Facebook.  I’m intentional with my time and my task, instead of muddying it up with all the excess that the world wants to dump onto me.  On my lunch, I may listen to a podcast or music, but I don’t wander aimlessly ingesting information overload that causes overwhelm and anxiety.  

Jenny Jacob’s daughter Kandi Grace just got a yucky rash on her back and now I can see all the photos. Krista Jones is ranting about the car rider pickup line at the middle school again.  This time she is BIG mad at the black Suburban.  John Harbin just posted his leg squat routine at the gym to his Insta reel. Stanley has just released new spring colors for their giant metal tumblers. The Dachshund Lovers page just posted three new videos of adorable sausage dogs doing adorable things. Taylor Swift released her new album, and “Honey, it is FIRE.” Princess Kate edited her family photo before posting to the Royal page and that is a big no-no.  Kanye did Kanye again…or whatever celebrity is the hot controversy of the day.  Meme upon endless reshared meme can be seen; ads for things I didn’t know I needed can be scrolled past. Recipes that I’ll never make and reels explaining how to do things that I’ll never do. Intimate moments shared by families I can spend time watching, when they’ll never even know I did.  

Darker content comes in floods too  – a mom on drugs left her newborn for hours alone; a religious leader sexually abused an underage girl; a celebrity came out as fill in the blank; a large university had an attempted shooting on campus, or worse yet a successful shooter.

Some of this info is okay and sometimes important to know. It’s okay to be aware of problems that need solutions in our society.  When this mass info rushes into our minds within a 60 second span; that’s when the rest for which our soul is longing is not found.  Our hearts and minds weren’t prepared to know it all – so much dumped in so quickly.  Our minds aren’t designed to ingest it all, because when they do, the things that really should matter are replaced.   

When I get home and after we’ve all had dinner, I can try to make a fresh loaf of bread, read a book, call a friend, wash some towels, journal, read my bible and pray over it, put a fresh coat of polish on my toes or take a long bath instead of a rushed shower.  I can listen more intently to my husband when he shares something about his day, or one of my children when they are sharing also.  I can replace the endless dump of spiritually useless information or God dishonoring shows to be streamed, and intentionally do something else. Sometimes that will look like service, sometimes rest, sometimes seeking knowledge.  Whatever it is that I choose to fill my time, it will have a purpose that endless phone scrolling never will. 

My soul longs.  It longs for something different, more purposeful, and more intentional.  Jesus says come to me.  I want to and I do.  I also want to more and more.  He says I will give you rest.  You and I, friend, can go together.  We can stop filling up on bucketloads of useless information that pulls our minds in a million different directions.  We can stop believing the lie that we can’t stop the cycle.  We can stop making excuses by saying we are just too busy, while filling up every spare moment with things that won’t matter in our world right now and especially in eternity. Today, let’s be a little more restful, a bit more intentional and look just beyond what is right in front of us. Mining beneath the ordinary to find simple joys, we can whisper a prayer of gratitude every time we find them.  

See a fantastic Country Time commercial here:

https://youtu.be/MtQEh8h7diw?si=Oj3UXLh2Fl28npty