(Editor’s Note: This article is taken from The Book of Mysteries, a series of daily devotionals based on conversations the author had with his “teacher” that lead to amazing discoveries).
“When we came into this world,” he said, “we entered it with a longing. We longed for milk. We had no idea what milk was. We had never tasted it. We had never seen it. Nobody ever told us that it existed. And yet the longing for milk was there deep inside our being before we had any assurance that it existed.” He paused. “And it turned out that it did exist. It turned out that what we longed for, what we knew only from the hunger deep inside our being … was real. There was a mother and a mother’s breast to answer our longings. Do you know where the word mother comes from?”
“I never thought of it.”
“The word was created by babies,” he said. All across the world, in almost every language on earth, you can hear in the word for mother, the cry of a baby: mamma, mom, amma, ema, mai, mata and ma. It comes from those first longings, the longing for milk. And all these words bear witness that to our longings there existed an answer.”
“But this is not about babies …”
“No. Our longing for milk passes away, but we find another longing within our hearts … another emptiness … another hunger … but deeper … a longing for that which the world never answers. We long for the perfect, for a perfect love, a perfect happiness, a perfect contentment, and a perfect peace. We long for that which doesn’t fail, that which never disappoints, or grows old, or passes away. We long for the eternal and the perfect. But the world can never answer those longings … and still they stay with us all the days of our lives. We long for it even though we’ve never tasted it. And our very longings bear witness that what we had never seen or tasted was real.”
“We long for perfect because the perfect exists … as we once longed for milk?”
“Yes, and we long for a perfect love because there is a Perfect Love. We long for the Eternal because the Eternal exists and the Eternal put that longing into our hearts so we would seek Him … and find Him.”
“So in the same way that out longing for milk once bore witness that although we had never yet seen it, milk existed, now the longing that is now in our hearts for the perfect, for the Eternal, for heaven bears witness that, although we have not yet seen it, heaven exists. Heaven is real.”
“Yes,” he said, “our deepest longings are the witness of the milk of heaven.”
What are the deepest needs and longings of your heart? Join them to Him. Bring them to Him, and receive from Him their filling.{eoa}
Prayer Power for the Week of Oct. 30, 2016
This week recognize the longing in your heart for Perfect Love and thank the Lord that the longing can be satisfied in Him. Ask Him to fill you to overflowing so that it spills out on those around you. Ask Him for opportunities to share Him with others, and bring His light into a dark world and His peace where there’s fear and anguish. Pray to be a carrier of His presence, especially in these insecure times. Continue to pray for an outpouring of His Spirit, for His direction in the upcoming elections, protection over our leaders and borders, and that His people would unite in prayer and purpose (Eccl. 3:11; Rom. 8:22-23; Phil. 4:6-9).
