Author Susan Cain’s research revealed that people played the happy songs on their playlists an average of 175 times but the sad songs 800 times. What is it about sad music that’s so compelling for many? Cain suggests it has to do with our hunger for longing—“joy that’s laced with sorrow. Which is often triggered when we experience something so exquisite that it seems to come to us from some other world. . . . Except it only lasts a moment, and we really want to live there for good.”
Longing, Cain argues, is inseparable from passion and love, for “the place you suffer is the exact same place where you care desperately.” So instead of fearing our pain, Cain suggests that our longing can point us “in the direction of the sacred.”
Cain’s insights remind me of how Paul describes how “the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay” (Romans 8:21). While Jesus has already defeated sin and death, we still wait for His victory to be seen in its fullness in all of creation.
That day isn’t here yet. We live in hope, and “if we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it” (v. 24). But as we wait, we experience joy and hope in the longing, as the Spirit carries and strengthens us in God’s love (vv. 26-27, 39).
-Monica La Rose
When have you experienced joy and sorrow simultaneously? How can longing connect us to hope?
Precious Father, thank You for filling my heart with longing for You and the beauty of Your kingdom. Help that hope to anchor my heart.
18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared
to the glory he will reveal to us later.
19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day
when God will reveal who his children really are.
20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse.
But with eager hope,
21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join
God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.
22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in
the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
23 And we believers also groan, even though we have
the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory,
for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering.
We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us
our full rights as his adopted children, including the
new bodies he has promised us.
24 We were given this hope when we were saved.
(If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it.
25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have,
we must wait patiently and confidently.)
26 And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness.
For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for.
But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that
cannot be expressed in words.
27 And the Father who knows all hearts knows what
the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers
in harmony with God’s own will.
If we look forward to something we don’t have yet, we must wait patiently and confidently.
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