Perhaps some days start out good. You slept well, the sunrise is lovely, and your coffee tastes great. But sooner or later things go wrong. Work reminds you that you’re not nearly as far along in your career as you’d hoped to be by now. Someone in your family is having a crisis. And when you stop long enough to look at your life you realize, this isn’t what I signed up for. You have so many unfulfilled longings.

If you’re honest with yourself, there are longings buried deep inside that you may wish you could ignore. Perhaps a long season of unwanted singleness is wearing on you. Or your marriage or your kids haven’t turned out as you imagined they would. Maybe your career or your finances are struggling. A chronic discontent leaves you wondering what you’ve done wrong. Or perhaps you blame God for how your life turned out.

Unfulfilled longings are part of the human experience. And it’s not a new problem. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12).

The only way to understand this longing is to keep eternity in mind. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” God “has put eternity into men’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11); He designed us to be unsatisfied with anything less!

But what do we do in the meantime? If this is not as good as it gets, do we resign ourselves to misery now? How can you live well regardless of your circumstances?

Learn to Grieve Well

Your grief might be over the death of a loved one, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Yesterday I was talking with a young woman who just broke up with her boyfriend. She was relieved to be free of an unhealthy relationship, but she was grieving the reality of being single – still.

Scripture frequently talks about giving voice to our sadness. What’s the life you wish you were living? How is your current life different from that? Perhaps you’d imagined a loving marriage and happy family, but you find yourself experiencing a tumultuous divorce, or infertility, or estrangement from children. Perhaps you grew up in a very dysfunctional family and you’re grieving that you never had, or will have, the kind of parents you needed. Or your marriage has been marred by infidelity or toxicity; it’s not the marriage you wanted and thought you had.

These situations and many more deserve our lament – an expression of grief or sorrow. There are many places in Scripture where God’s best friends expressed lament. The Psalms are full of them; “For I am ready to fall, and my pain is ever before me” (Psalm 38:17). “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).

What do you need to grieve? You might write a lament, directing your sorrow to God, as the writers of the Psalms did.

Live Well Now

Lamenting your unfulfilled longings frees your spirit to experience real joy now. Embracing joy does not mean the pain doesn’t matter, but joy does give you strength. You can choose to live fully into whatever good things are available in your current circumstances of life.

I learned this in my marriage. As a little girl I might have imagined marrying relatively young and having children of my own. Still being single in my 40s forced me to deal with a different reality. When God brought my loving husband into my life, I had to decide whether or not to embrace the good things this blended family life brought. I could feel upset when Al and his boys talked about childhood memories I could never share, or I could choose to enjoy the actual family God had blessed me with. I’m glad I chose the latter; I still have a family now after Al’s death – because I embraced the good that was offered to me.

Suffering is real, but so is breakthrough. Few if any of us experience all the goodness that God is offering – the healing, transformation, restoration, and Fully Alive kind of living that we can experience here and now.

What good is being offered to you in your actual life right now? What does it look like to follow Jesus, to grow the fruit of the Spirit, in the life you have? Love, joy, and peace are not dependent on outside circumstances. Where can you actively choose healing and find the good that’s being offered to you today?

Keep Eternity in Mind

There’s nothing easy about living in our sinful messed-up world while we wait for the kingdom of God to come in fulness. Our healing and restoration here and now is real, but it is also incomplete. Remember, we were not made for this earth; we were made for eternity! And our souls will only be fully satisfied when we get there.

It’s become fashionable in some contemporary Christian circles to downplay eternity. The future is made to look like a never-ending church service in the sky – who wants that? Or the promise of Jesus is made out to be “your best life now,” and that’s most certainly not what Jesus promised. Without eternity, we’re miserable: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

The end goal of the Christian life is not going to heaven when you die; the end goal is the full and complete “restoring all the things” (Acts 3:21) – restoring you and me to who God originally created us to be, and restoring the earth and the universe to all its original glory. Everything, everything, will be made right. If you keep saying Yes to Jesus, your eternal home is right here on earth – but on an earth made completely new (Isaiah 65:17, Revelation 21:1).

I don’t want to miss that! I want to grieve well those things that are not as they should be (and there are many), to embrace every bit of goodness Jesus makes available now, and to experience the absolutely glorious eternity for which I was made. And I hope you want that too!

So, keep showing up. And keep saying Yes.

Your Turn: Have you struggled with wondering if this is as good as it gets? What unfulfilled longings keep your heart unsettled? Which of these three ways of addressing the reality of your life do you need to pay most attention to now?   Leave a comment below.

Want more? In this week’s podcast episode I talk with Chuck DeGroat about dealing with the messy stuff within your own soul while we await eternity.  Listen or Watch.

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• Unfulfilled longings are part of our real life here and now. This life was never meant to be our satisfaction. Learn to lament well, to live well in your real life, and to still keep eternity in mind.  Tweet that.

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