After six and a half years of longing for a baby, the Father gave us two. Two precious, perfect little lives. I love my boys so much. They’ve made my heart and life feel so full.
But during those six and a half years when we hoped and longed and pined for a child, I thought that the terrible, life-sucking emptiness I felt would all be better if I could just have one baby. Now I have two babies to love. But already I’ve felt the longing for more enter my heart. Baby longing. It came so quickly, so unexpectedly.
Why is contentment so hard to achieve? Why is it, that with these two little five-month-olds clinging to me, I still feel the most desperate sense of longing?
It’s a fearful sort of longing. Wanting more babies, knowing I may never have them. Knowing we lost two. Two precious lives that I love so deeply, two precious lives that I’ll never hold on this earth. Knowing we have two still frozen, frozen and waiting in uncertainty and expectancy. Loving the two I already have, longing for the two that are lost and the two that are in suspended life.
Do love and longing always go together? If I didn’t love these babies I have now so much, would I long so much for more?
Or perhaps, longing is really the opposite of love. Perhaps if I were more full of love—love for my two babies that are with me here and now, love for my husband, love for the God who gave these three to me—perhaps then this longing for more wouldn’t feel so severe.
Much as I’d like to think that longing is the result or equivalent of love, my heart tells me the opposite. My heart tells me that all the energy I put into longing, that energy ought instead to be put into loving. Love is an investment. It brightens my own heart, and brings health and joy to myself and those around me. Longing really seems to be the opposite, doesn’t it? Is longing really more than a common thief, robbing me of the contentment I ought to have in God and the wonderful gifts he has given me?
The Father has commanded contentment, in Him. All else might be lost, but we are to be joyful in His salvation. To long for Him. Is this the only true and worthy type of longing, after all? Longing for His kingdom to come and His will to be done?
Yet as September has turned into October and I’ve been thrown into a sea of wondrous memories of this time last year, and the newness of the lives I was carrying at the time, all I seem able to feel is this tearful longing for more.