Unexplained Longing

Long before car seats or even seat belts, there was the flat bench seat in a car.
I remember, as a little girl, sitting in the flat bench seat between my parents.
I remember laying in the back seat and falling asleep on long car rides.
I remember my mother singing.

She would pass the time singing song after song.
I would fall asleep to the sound of her voice.
I remember one song in particular that she would always sing at Christmas time.
The song was, Toyland.

Even as a little girl, the song made me sad.
In my little girl’s heart, I could not articulate the sadness, but it was there.
Looking back, it wasn’t really sadness; it was more of a longing.
It was a longing that I could not explain.

C.S. Lewis was intrigued with this longing.
This longing had a name.
It was a German word that captured the essence of what Lewis and others felt.
Sehnsucht.

...it’s one of those aspects of life that seems to require another’s articulation of it before our own awareness of it…It was a word beloved of the German Romantic poets like Goethe and as such attracted Lewis’s attention, via his hero George MacDonald. You can tell that a language is struggling when it has to borrow from another. So inevitably, what the word grapples with is hard to define in English. “Disorienting longing” might be one definition, while simultaneously being a “blissful longing;” an experience with intimations of a transcendent reality, another. It’s that profound—if fleeting—sense, not only that there’s more to existence than anything in this life, but also that the beyond is where we belong. That’s why we yearn for it. (https://rabbitroom.com/2019/11/sehnsucht-the-intensity-of-yearning/)

Was that what I was experiencing?
A longing in my little girl’s heart that I could not understand?
Knowing that I was going to leave the safety of childhood one day.
A longing for more.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. (C.S. Lewis)

I thought about Sehnsucht.
I thought about the song my mother sang.
I thought about my sadness as I lay on the back seat of the car.
I thought of the unnamed something I felt, that made my throat tighten, even to this day.

Toyland, toyland
Little girl and boy land
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy there

Childhood’s joy land
Mystic merry toyland
Once you pass its borders
You can ne’er return again
(Toyland, Victor Herbert)

The song had a certain finality to it.
There is a place that is wonderful, but you will leave it.
Once you leave it, you can never return again.
Was that the something that made me sad?

As an adult, a believer in Jesus, the words of the song take on a different meaning.
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy there
While your dwell within it; it is a temporary place.

Sadly, this world is all some people know.
This world is everything to them, with no thought of the next.
This world is not permanent; there is so much more.
There is eternity.

All the wonder, all the happiness we have here, pales in comparison to there.
We know it in our hearts.
God has put Eternity there.
The Sehnsucht we experience is a longing for our true home.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

God has put eternity in our hearts.
We know that this world does not satisfy our deepest longing.
We know that we will pass this world’s borders one day.
When we see our Lord Jesus face to face, we will not want to go back.

When we see His face, our Sehnsucht will be fulfilled.
The beauty of this world has His fingerprints all over it.
There is a longing deep in our hearts for something that this world cannot offer.
That Something is really Someone, and we will see Him one day as He is.

Sehnsucht will be no more.
The borders of this world will be crossed and will be forgotten.
Time will be no more.
Death will be no more.

We will spend eternity with the One who fulfills our deepest longing.
Even in my little girl heart, I knew.
I could not have told you then what I longed for, but I knew that there was something more.
There is Someone more who will greet us one day on the other side.

No more longing.
Sehnsucht will be fulfilled.
The One, for whom we have always longed, will be standing in front of us.
Welcome Home.