Frustration: a journey from childish foot stomping to holy longing

frustrationThis is the first post in a series on frustration. View them all here.

If anyone has even halfway known me for any amount of time, they would know that I struggle with frustration. I want everything and I want it yesterday. This surfaces much in my ministry life, as it often feels like hard work to feel content. I know others who deal with the same thing, especially church planters. I believe it’s a combination of the personality of one attracted to church planting and the slow nature of the work. Frustration is even in the description people use of the young, restless and reformed movement (if you want to call it that). Restless. Anxious. Unsettled. These are all versions of frustration. Continue reading

Empty and Holy Longings

This was originally posted on orlandograce.org.

“The whole life of a good Christian is a holy longing.” —Augustine

We are filled with so many loves, so many wants, so many desires for things and people and ideas, how can we know what we should attach ourselves to? It’s hard to figure out what we want and what we really want. How do we discern between empty longings and holy longings? What do we do with these desires?

We all have longings, it’s really more a matter of what kind they are and our level of attachment to them. If it’s an empty longing, we should want our level of attachment to be low or even nonexistent. If it’s a holy longing, we should want to be more attached than not. And of course there are gradients of good and bad and there are right orderings of our desires.

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