The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was a longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited — C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

I stood at the back of the arena filled with 20,000 enthusiastic women who had come to worship and to lean in and listen. In thirty minutes it would be my turn to take the stage. My husband and son sat in the front row, proud, excited, fiercely loyal and loving. These were the best days of my life — yet I was overwhelmed with a palpable weight of loneliness.

“What is this, Lord?” I prayed. “I have everything I ever wanted so what is this ache?”

I know my experience is unique. Few women have stood in front of crowds like these. Maybe what I felt there isn’t so unusual, though. I was aching in spite of it all. Do you ever feel as if you keep coming back to the same place in life over and over again, and you wonder why you’re here? Didn’t you learn all you had to learn the last time? You vowed you’d never repeat the same mistakes, react in the same way, and yet here you find yourself, right back smack in the middle of it all one more time! What I’m learning is that if I don’t understand why I respond a certain way in a particular set of circumstances, I’ll do it again and again.

The human heart longs for closure and understanding. In many ways it longs to right the wrongs of our childhood so we feel more in control of situations over which we had no control as children. We try to change the ending of something that scarred us badly.

When we’ve had a happy childhood and been well parented, our internal radar looks for those admirable qualities in a mate. We want someone with good boundaries and fairly healthy self-esteem, someone who can handle a budget, who respects others and will respect us. Many of us who were deeply wounded in childhood, however, have a warped picture of what that connectedness should look like. The innate longing to be loved and chosen can lead us into very damaging situations. We simply don’t have a clear picture of what “normal” is.

This warped perspective can lead us down many different heartbreaking roads. I’ve read that sexual predators can sense when a young girl is broken and starving for affection, almost as if she emits a radar signal that she’s looking for love and acceptance — and will take it in any form when “love” is offered. The longing to be chosen is profoundly primal. When a young girl has a healthy relationship with her father, when she knows that she is loved and treasured, then that instinctive longing takes its place with every other good desire and need in life. It weighs what it should. But when that need is unmet in childhood, the longing to be chosen becomes the driving force in life. As a young girl, I felt uncovered, exposed, unprotected. It was the perfect prelude to desperate choices.

When my life fell apart I found a raw, real relationship with Christ in the ashes, based on nothing I brought to the table but based on His relentless love. Which takes me back to that prayer I mentioned earlier: “What is this, Lord? I have everything I ever wanted, so what is this ache?”

I’ve never heard the audible voice of God but I heard Him clearly in my spirit.

“Do not despise this place … it is a sacred ache, a place that only I can fill. It is a longing for home.”

For the next two years I poured my life into writing The Longing In Me. This just-released book is the most vulnerable, transparent thing I’ve ever written. I’ve never talked about my first marriage before. I never dreamt I would ever share about our family’s bankruptcy — but I believe that we are not alone in our longings, our brokenness and when we share our stories we feel less alone. So I have poured my heart onto every page.

No matter how great our longing is for God it will never come close to His longing for us.

That’s my prayer for you. I pray that in the midst of whatever may be true for you right now, you would experience that love.

My dear friend, the late Brennan Manning, said it so beautifully,

“Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever.”