When all things conspire to increase longing

Tranquility has to come from beneath the surface.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal! wrote Longfellow is his poem, A Psalm of Life. We all know that, but sometimes we do let life get us down.  We all have times when we are dissatisfied with how things are, and seek for something different, something better. It is possible for dissatisfaction to imprison our spirits and deflate our dreams.

Bernard Bro's book Happy Those Who Believe, directly addresses this situation:

Consider Zacchaeus, who struggled against the prison of his conscious; Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman, who struggled against the prison of their heart...All sensed a call. They were in a state of dissatisfaction...we would never have dared to imagine these preparatory cries of the Old Testament when God said to Daniel: "I came to you because you were a man of desire." And in Jeremiah: "I will put them in anguish so that they may find me."  

I think the key here may be desire. Life can weigh down on us, it can threaten to crush us, it can take away the sparkle we once had in believing all things are possible. As we mature, we sometimes begin to think that past dreams were childish, and we put them aside. We begin to accept fate as inevitable, and life as a series of unavoidable events. It is as though we our journey in life got a flat tire, and we became content to drive through life on the rim. But we shouldn't.

That is why it is important to dig deeper, to find the meaning hidden in the event, be it pleasant or otherwise. If I live a deeper spiritual life, I will find the gift hidden in circumstance, I will not become a fatalist. Instead, I will see the lesson I am meant to learn, and in that very lesson, I will find God.

Part of believing is remembering that I am called. I have a mission, and despite all the chaos, I will discover it. So I must never settle for that flat tire. I must change it and move on. I can believe so as to show the world that all things can conspire to increase longing, that my dissatisfaction itself signals there is more to be had, and I will have it. Then dissatisfaction will work in my favor; and I will find, even in the midst of chaos, something of my dreams.