desire on Aroma

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

The creation of food, tongues, and the human digestive system is the product of infinite wisdom knitting the world together in a harmonious whole. The symphony of glory that sounds from the triune bei...

There is an energy within all of us that haunts us and can either lead us to set out on a quest for something more or can frustrate us by making us nostalgic for what we do not have.

All joy emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.

Desire, if it’s to be trusted, should be inspired by a divine vocabulary.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you,...

Creator of all things, Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, Father, Shepherd, Servant, Brother, Priest and King. Whose love poured out mends broken hearts. Whose wounded hands reach out to all. Whose S...

Many of the greatest Christian spiritual teachers and mystics such as Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius Loyola, or some of the seventeenth-century Anglican spiritual writers focus on the language...

"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...

Bit by intelligible bit, a vocation lets us express our healthiest instincts, our noblest desires… In small things and in large, we can attend to the haunting inner summons of our soul.

Any manifestation that reveals Jesus’ true identity occurs because the power of God is at work upon the eyes, ears, and hearts of the recipients

But you take pleasure in the faces Of those who know they thirst.

A large part of what it means to be human is to be one who longs after things. Sometimes, we have trouble putting into words the longings inside us. Take for example these words from Anne Frank, just ...

Where love is, there is the eye.

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C. S. Lewis describes this...

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

Gracious God, the noise of this world drowns out the beauty of your voice. You invite us to listen, but we deny you time and space. Forgive us for ignoring you. Create in us the desire to listen to yo...

Unsurprisingly, whenever we bring the topic of desire into view, our imaginations easily wander in the direction of sex, which can be as discomforting as it is arousing—but it is certainly not irrelev...

Discipline leads us to desire, which matures into delight.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

It is not your idea, not your understanding, not your thinking, not your reasoning, not even your profession of faith, that here can quench the thirst. The home-sickness goes out after God Himself... ...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted, because of all the desires I have ever known, just one did I cling to for it was the essence of all desire: to hold beauty in my soul’s arms.

Almighty and Everlasting God, who are the brightness of faithful souls and the desire of all nations; so fill the world with your glory and show yourself by the radiance of your light that all the peo...

Desire is primal: to be human is to want

O God, the Father Almighty, who has promised to give the Holy Spirit to those that ask you,; look graciously upon us assembled with one accord in one place to make our prayer to you, and to wait for y...

There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it. And the more heightened the desire, the greater our satisfaction will ultimately be. It ...

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy th...

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.