I Have Wanted You All My Life

All my life have I loved Him. All my life have I cried out for more of Him. I have yearned. I have panted. I have searched. I have knocked. And I have found. I have tasted. I have seen. Yet every taste only pierced me with greater longing. Every slaked thirst forged a new and greater cavern of holy aching. He is the only One whose satisfaction only creates greater capacities of desire. Every taste births new hungers.

And all my life have I prayed the highest prayers:

I want to know You, not just in part, but in full. I want all that You are. I desire friendship with You above all else. Whatever it takes. Send south winds. Send north. Send storm and fire and rains, but give me Yourself, and let me be pleasing to You.

Costly prayers are met with costly answers. He came to that door, knocking. His head covered with the drops of the night. Jesus of Gethsemane. He knew the night ahead. He knew the darkness descending. He invited me to come into the depths, where the treasures of my costly prayers would be found, but only in the blackness and ashes and deafening silence…and through passageways that would cut to the very quick of me—beyond where I thought could possibly still come under the banner of His care, under the banner of friendship with Himself.

He confounded me with His searing silence. With His seeming absence. With circumstances that leveled and trampled and left me barely alive. He answered my sincere prayers and cries in ways that seemed almost cruel, and then followed the shattering with billows of deafening divine silence. And the accuser screamed at full volume into the void: He has left you. You have lost your mind. You never were what you thought. He never was with you. It was all always a mirage.  

And few stepped in to say otherwise. Yet those few lone voices in the wilderness will simply never be forgotten. Theirs were the sound that kept my fingers clinging to the good, to hope…to the One my soul loves.

Martin Luther said,

You must know God as enemy before You know Him as a friend. 

RT Kendall speaks of the betrayal barrier that every believer must break through in their relationship with God. When God’s ways are offensive, confusing and unexplainable, what will we do? most do not keep trusting God in these trials. But some press through, believing God’s Word in such a way as to nearly break their mental capacities for how contrary to reality it would seem. They keep trusting God after they feel betrayed by Him. For these ones, they find on the other side of that barrier, a faith that is not weakened but refined into something resilient and untamed. A faith more precious than gold, having been refined by fire.

Mary of Bethany met this betrayal barrier at Lazarus’s tomb. She sent for Jesus early, knowing He was close enough to come, yet He stayed where He was until her brother had died. When she saw Him, her words were raw and honest:

Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.

Beneath those words was a question that every friend of God eventually asks: Where were You?

Habakkuk faced the same spiritual collision—watching his worst fears transpire while God seemed to do nothing. His complaint was met not with a detailed explanation, but with a call to wait until “the end” for the full answer (Hab. 2:3). And Habakkuk chose the costly path of living by faith in God’s delay, declaring:

Though the fig tree does not bud…yet I will rejoice in the Lord (Hab. 3:17).

This is not pretending the pain doesn’t hurt or the delay doesn’t scourge us. It’s the sobering, trembling choice to keep trusting when every instinct says to pull away from Him. It’s clinging to His goodness in the darkness, when our understanding fails, and our hearts ache with unanswered questions. With Habakkuk we say, Yet will I trust. With the Bride, we say, Tell Him I am lovesick (Song. 5:8).

Even when He delays. Even when it’s too late in our eyes. Even when death has had its way.

If I have prayed costly prayers: All I want is You. You are my reward. Whatever it takes. Give me Yourself, and then He leads my life in such a way so as to give me Himself in ways I’ve never known - to the innermost parts of my being, etched with the flaming fire of everlasting burnings — even though these ways also mean unprecedented loss in all the secondary things —when His answers have leveled parts of my life I thought He would protect— how can I call it anything but good? How can I title it anything other than an exceeding divine kindness?

What if I have finally laid hold of Him? That Man of fire that walks among the lampstands? The One who is not safe, but good? The First and the Last, who died and behold, He is alive forevermore? If I have laid hold of Him - then no circumstance need change for there to be closure and joy in my soul. For me to say, I trust Him wholly. Both in His sweetness and in His severity. In the bitter and the sweet. He is altogether lovely. He is the gain. Knowing Him is the gold.

If I have found the One my soul loves, what really have I lost? Are not all of those things rubbish compared to the gain of this new knowing of Him?

All that He is beautiful, not just the palpable and the sweet. But the undiluted intensity. The untamed severity. That part of Him that said to the disciples, This will not end in death, but for the glory of God, and then waited two more days, though He knew that His friend would die and His other friends would be shattered with sorrow and a sense of His betrayal. Still, He delayed. Allowing the crisis of death and confusion and guttural grief, compounded with dashed hope. This too is His beauty. His glory. His matchless ways. And I bow down and kiss the Son. Though He slays me, yet will I trust Him. He can be trusted.

I have made it to the other side of the seeming betrayal of the Lord. And on the other side I am beginning to see what my eyes have never seen of His beauty. My mouth is tasting of a sweetness beyond anything I’ve tasted before. The darkest night was the passage way to the dwelling of light, the threshold to deepest friendship with the untamable Man of fire, whose ways are exceedingly higher than mine (Job 38:19).

I have wanted Him all my life.

And gazing on His beauty, pierced by His matchlessness, I lift my voice once more to say with conviction holy, like gold in fire:

He is altogether lovely.

He has answered me.