There are unexpected moments of wonder as a teacher when the roles between you and your students are reversed. The students teach you things
at a moment when you least expect it and you suddenly become their student. It
is sublime.
Late one morning I was
standing in my reading well with the kids huddled around me. Sometimes I feel
like a mother hen with her chicks surrounding her nest. We were reading The Growing
Table, a biography of Farmer Will Allen, who wanted to grow food
to feed the world. When I asked the kids how they would describe
him after I had finished reading the story, one of the students raised his hand
and said, "He was smart and he had longing." As the words fell from his lips, I stopped,
so intrigued. "What did you mean?" I asked, giving him a high 5.
"He had longing to make his dream come true."
As I went to lunch later that day, I wondered about Jesus’
statement, Let the little children come
to me…for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. Kids are so full of wonder and
perspective. Uninhibited, unafraid to
spill fourth what is in their soul.
Children, I am convinced, have something to teach us, and we are wise to
surround ourselves with them, stopping to listen to what they have to say.
The student in my reading well gave me such pause because I
experience a daily dose of L-O-N-G-I-N-G.
“Who thought up this word!?”
I have repeatedly asked my friends, almost angry. “It has the word L-O-N-G in it!”
They shrug, unsure how to respond, not liking its nature
either.
But I can’t get away from this experience of
L-O-N-G-I-N-G. It’s been stretching
itself out in me for months. Every day
around 9:30AM, while I snack on nuts and cheese, and I feel this ache emerge
from my soul. It’s as if someone has
taken their fist, reached into my chest, grabbed hold of my heart with their fingers,
and is now pulling me along in their grasp.
Longing looks in both directions. In one direction, longing stands at a closed
door. Grieving over a beloved past,
unable to enter that time or experience ever again. Longing knocks at the door in vain.
Longing also turns and stretches out its fingers over a new
horizon, open and willing to grab hold of a breathtaking future that is rising
with the sun. They skies are not filled
with tears from this angle, but are bursting forth, highlighting the canvas
with orange and pink.
It’s scary to name the things we are grieving or are
reaching for. We don’t want to say
Hope’s name aloud, because we all know that Hope has an ugly step-sister,
Disappointment. She crowds the
conversation sometimes, endlessly reminiscing about the pain of the past, and
when she is done, you want to stop dreaming, stop feeling. You leave the room, realizing you have
nothing to say to Hope.
But the second grader in my reading well hasn’t meet
Disappointment, or at least, hasn’t learned to listen to her yet. His observation of longing, suggests that it is
essential to moving forward, to being expanded.
“L-O-N-G-I-N-G
is this insightful word that has given feeling to distance. This ache between where
we are and where we want to be. Longing, I realized that day, is the discomfort
that ultimately propels people forward to make change in the world, to make
their dreams a reality. Longing holds hands with hope, and together, their
friendship brings forth our dreams.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a
longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
Proverbs 13:12
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