Why Do I Long for Him?

Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself.
[1 Sam 18:1]

Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
[Psalm 73:25]

Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.
[Song of Solomon 2:7, 3:5, 8:4]

Is he my David or my Jonathan? Is he my own, given to me by God?

I have set my heart to seek nothing.

Since I knew God, I have needed nothing, but God alone.

And then I met him.

Why am I obsessed with him? Why does he occupies my spirit, my heart and my thoughts day and night, for years, and have changed and moved me in ways unthinkable before I knew him?

And all this outpouring here is a necessary catharsis, to cope with the constant tumult within me, and the restless, totally strange, and cannot-be-comforted anguish of being out-of-joint, in this present estrangement and separation from him.

Is this desire for him of God, and not of myself, and if so how do I know it?

How do I know it is not of my flesh, disguising itself as godly? For surely our hearts are deceitful.

Why is my desire for him of spirit and not of the flesh?

One justification I can make to myself is that I have not strayed away from God.

On contrary I have come to know and hear God in ways more intimate than ever before.

Since knowing him, I have been seeking God even more desperately than I ever had. Never have I prayed so unceasingly, so searchingly and so purposefully, trying to discern His mind and heart, and His will in the matter; and seizing and pursuing God unrelentingly, with full abandon, throwing myself wholly and completely to the task, without care and desire for anything else.

And then I can also affirmed that my desire was stirred not by sex and is not sexual at all, at least not until I loved him. There were opportunities for sex, in the brief but very intense and happy moments we had together, such as when we went on a holiday overseas, but it just never happened. And one of the reasons is that I just didn't feel right, not unless he too loved me the way I loved him. And that's what I told him. And I loved him in a way I never before loved.

I first saw his beauty in his sad, pained eyes at Coffee Bean. And I fell in love with him in that instance.

And it was deja vu all over.

For I had seen such beauty in those special others in the past too, inevitably fallen madly in love with them, and becoming someone other than myself.

Yes, indeed beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but not that the beholder sees a beauty that is imaginary within himself, but rather he is privileged and given to see the intrinsic and essential beauty in the other. And not everyone is so given, but only the beholder.

And before I met him, I was in a heartbroken state. I had loved someone else thirteen years ago, a love I knew cannot be other than phileo. I am fully aware it cannot be eros, as he is not my own. Nonetheless it edged close to other than phileo, and when it ended - as in we have to part ways - it hurt bad, very bad. I felt my heart shattering into a thousand pieces and each thousandth piece yet into another thousand pieces. And all these scattered pieces froze over, cold, hard and unfeeling. And I could not love any for the past seven years, until I saw his beauty.

Then without my realisation, or effort, all the broken pieces of my heart is now restored and whole again. My heart is now all bloody again, beating and intoxicated with love, yearning and driving me along ways unknown to me, making me alive to the thrills of discovery of life, in myself, in him, and in us, but also aware of the pains and sorrows that is part of it all..

And he is more than the others I have loved. For only in him was I moved deep within me to want to protect this beauty, to defend it from being marred and corrupted, and to present it as a lovely offering to God. And this is in part because I foresaw where he was going and I was already in pain to want to prevent it. And this all happened in that instance I saw him.

But alas I seemed to have failed. He has said he is not mine to be offered to anyone. He life is his own to live, anyway he wants. And now not only has he become my worst fears, he has also entirely cut me off from him. He has shut himself behind an impenetrable and unmitigated wall of fierce hostility and utterly rejects me. He will take no calls from me, answer no SMS or email, and have walked past me as if I never existed when I approached him face to face.

Why then do I constantly yearn for him?

And God yet comforts me. For if God can raise the dead to life, surely he can also make holy the corrupted, and to restore that shattered. And as the body of Christ was pierced, yet none of his bones were broken, so can the flesh be marred and even destroyed, but God will be able to keep the soul pure and undefiled. And in death and despair, that which the world counts as defeat, may indeed be God's greatest victory, even as the death of Christ glorifies God in the manifestation of grace, wisdom, mercy and power of God in the resurrected Christ.

And so I have hope; and that my labour in spirit has not been in vain.

But he is literally dead to me now. The person I once knew is no longer around. All I have of him is his spirit in me. And I can only hope that God resurrect him by putting or reviving in him this spirit in that body of his which now hosts a stranger.

But if I am to go to my grave even as he is now, yet I will still labour in spirit for his soul. This I must, for God has given him to me.

And my hope is in God, and God alone, that he will not betray the thing he has put in my heart, neither does he mocks or torments me with delusions and falsehoods. Instead He will surely fulfill to its utmost fullness, far beyond anything imaginable, whatever inkling of desire he has deposited in my heart.

The Rock and the Raging River

Where was once a forest, is now all desert,
but where once was barren parched sands, is green all over;
Where once a mighty river, is now all forgotten,
but where once an impenetrable wall of rock, is a raging river.

My Cry

I am assured before the Lord
for I seek justice and righteousness
that I may be justified
and he restored to righteousness

The LORD loves righteousness and justice [Ps 33:5]

The Call of Pain

Whenever I'm in pain
I resist crying out
but to turn into the Light
to seek the reason, the purpose
and to be that reason and that purpose

To seek the face of God
to cling to his hands
to smother myself in his bosom
to know his heart and his mind
to learn of him
to hear Him speak
to recognise His voice
in its various forms
in its many types
always fresh, peaceable and gentle

To renew my trust
to believe him yet again
to be strengthened and comforted
to be exhalted in his revelations
to glimpse the might and the power of his hands
to be assured that he is true
and will not betray the longings
he has put in my heart
but even more so will accomplish far more than is imaginable
and I will forget all the pain when the day arrives

And I will sing and soar
in song and praise
to declare him to all
for our God loves us!

Constant Pain

I cried and cried
till I can cry no more
But the pain remains
And thus it is to remain

And there are others
in constant pain too
who also cried
but God tarried too.

But He loves us
And cares for us
And cries with us too
The pain must be necesary for Him.

We often forget this
And search and search within
To see if the pain was our own causing
We must learn to see when its not

So God hears
We need no longer ask
I now seek to know why
And what profit there is in the pain

What Can It Be?

That gays are called of God too, and that marriage is not of physical union nor of gender, but of the union of souls.

• But are you not called as you are now? And is not marriage merely a shadow of the the true marriage which is between Christ and his church? What need then of another, and what need then of two becoming one?

That Eros, the love of your own, is something ordained by God, literally made in and for heaven, and we can wait for God to reveal the other to each other in his time.

• But are we all not already one in and for each other, having been born of the same spirit, and thus joined, to build up the church.

That I need him, and that we are to enable each other for the tasks ordained for us in God.

• But, even so, can it not be anyone else? Why him? And what is this task ordained? What reasons can justify believing that there is such a task? It could merely be rationalisation for, what then will be, an ungodly pursuit?

That God have stirred and upended my soul within me that I cannot do anything but cry out and yearn for him to become one, even as Jonathan became knitted to David as one soul.

• But he does not similarly yearn so, for wasn't Jonathan and David matched mutually and simultaneously?

All in Faith

Let all that I do
be of the spirit and not the flesh
And neither let me put God to test
But that whatever I do is in faith.

Everything that does not come from faith is sin. [Rom 14:23]

And faith is to act, in fear, upon the truth and knowledge of God, as revealed in a dynamic and on-going relationship with God.

He is Our Reason

He stirs in us Life
He puts in us a Reason
And then he puts the Reason far away
out of reach of our wits and efforts
seemingly impossible
And we are compelled to turn to Him and Him alone
to fulfil our Reason for us
and in so doing He becomes our Reason

Is this the way of God?

Abraham was promised a nation far numerous than the stars
But he had only Issac for which he waited way past the age humanly conceivable
Israel was promised a Land
But he became enslaved in a land far from their own
Israel was given Moses to set them free
But not until their burden became far heavier than what it was, and then there was the Red Sea

My Heart, My Heart

You have become what I foresaw and dreaded.
You are what I strived to stop and to protect from,
But you have become as corrupted as my worst fears
Even as my soul beseeched God
to keep you pure, innocent and beautiful,
as you are born to be.

I poured out my entire being for you and to you
to be a cocoon of love around you
But you rejected it,
and instead build around you a strong wall of iron,
a mile thick, and reaching to the skies.

I am out of joint,
I am dislocated
All within me is in tumult
Just as I was
when you rejected my love
after we had crab for dinner
I cannot understand
I do not know why

I cried to God
I asked Him why He awakened my broken and frozen heart
to love you but yet not
I seeked God like I never had before
ceaselessly, searchingly and most desperately
Surely God does not stir in me a futile hope to mock me
for surely he loves me and cares for me
even as he loves and cares for you
O God where are you leading me?
O God where are you leading us?

I cannot see you
I cannot hear you
Yet I know you
And I see you

I see you walking through mud and scum
I see the clear crystal vase that you are
dropped, rolled around, filled with all sorts
I am agonised with fear and dread
that the vessel be scratched, cracked or marred.

I cry out voicelessly
reached out unreachably
I am in pain beyond pain
I am like a prisoner in bounds
striving against it but unable to break it
impotent and powerless
to stop you from defiling and descrating yourself

My heart bleeds
pierced over and over again
but yet it will not die
In warm glistening blood
it pulsates refusing to die
for now I have a reason to live

How long O LORD
How long must I bear the pain
How much more depraved is he to become
How much more pain beyond pain must I bear