Sehnsucht

This picture that I took from my first summer in NYC has always haunted me, and captured the gritty longing I have for a place which so many clamor to leave, or that so many long to make their fortune in.

I expected to love New York City.  I had been dreaming of it since age 13, when I had first began watching the show "Love Sydney" which had an opening shot of Tony Randall and a little girl (Kaleena Kiff) playing in Central Park.  I knew that the reality would be exactly as I imagined it.

And it was.  New York is one of those few places that the camera captures accurately.  When you watch crime shows and feel the steaming hot pavement and can almost smell the urine-soaked streets?  It is exactly like that.  When you feel that pull of the glamour and glitz of Broadway, and the excitement that those in movies have to go to "the city" it is exactly like that.  When you see the unquenchable crowds crossing any downtown street and feel claustrophobic just imagining their press, you feel exactly what a person crossing the street there feels.  And to me it was glorious.  All of it.

At age 17, I took it all in, with all the wonder of a child in Disneyland.  From the beaches of Coney Island (we handed out Bibles to newly arrived Russian Jews who had never held one before), to the shops on Steinway Street (where a Lebanese man kept fondling my upper arm, trying to get me to come with him in the back---even AFTER I told my entire team, and the guys insisted on going back so they could catch him in the act but DIDN'T) to our trip to Metro Assembly in Brooklyn to see the "Sunday School" of all Sunday schools, I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF EVERY MINUTE. 

I expected to love it.  What I didn't expect was the overwhelming all-encompassing feeling that haunted me from the moment I arrived.  There was an undeniable, unmistakable sense that I was in the place designed for me.  That all of my life I had been seeking the place I now stood.  That until the moment my feet set foot in Gotham, nothing had truly been right.  As the summer neared it's eventual end, the feeling got stronger and the thought of leaving seemed impossible.  In this place, I was alive, in this place I was at peace, in this place, I was who I was created to be.  I was heartsick at the thought of ever being anyplace else.

The Germans have a word.  Sehnsucht.  It's almost untranslateable and Wikipedia has a whole article devoted to trying.  It's that piercing longing, that force deep inside of my stomach that I got anytime I thought of the city.  It's the familiarity I had with New York before I ever saw it, and that sense you sometimes feel when you meet someone that you know was preordained to be in your life---that "Where have you been?" recognition that washes over you when they finally show up.  It's a deja vu to something new, it's an unanswered call that resonates from your entire being, the desire to be found. 

Jesus is like that.  When we feel lost, and discombobulated.  When we are deeply lonely, and deeply longing for that person who fits us perfectly, or that we think does.  When we feel outside of ourselves, like we don't quite fit our present circumstances, when we have a thirst that we cannot quite quench.  When we try to satisfy it with food, or TV or Facebook, or church, or coffee dates. 

He is there, calling us softly.  The great initiator who waits for us to realize what we really long for, is Him.  HE is our HOME.  He is the  old pair of blue jeans that come out of the washer and feel just right.  He is the scent that we remember but can't quite find.  He is the person, and THE ONLY person who fits us just right.  He is the drink which when we finally remember to drink---we take in in large gulps like medicine.  He is the answer, the only answer to Sehnsucht.