The heart voices a kind of loneliness that can never be completely filled, answered, or quieted as long as we live. This loneliness awakens us to our emotional and spiritual longing for God.
Have you ever seen a sunset that struck your heart with its strength of color spread all over the sky and ground? The part of you that is struck by such movement and beauty is the same part that aches with the recognition of how incomplete you are. In the aching, your heart recognizes the need for the One who made it.
This loneliness for more goodness and fullness quite often comes in moments of celebration — a child’s birth, a twenty-fifth anniversary, a graduation, a marriage. The goodness of celebration, which must be felt to be truly known, will end. In our hearts we want to go where the wonder, celebration, passion, and relational fulfillment never stop. We want to go to the source of this goodness.
When my oldest son was about three, I remember showing him his first rainbow. Instead of stopping in the wonder of it, he began walking toward it, saying, “Take me there, Daddy.” His heart was lonely, longing to be more a part of the beauty. He valued it. When he found out that I couldn’t take him there, he ached in his waiting for what he could not completely have, but what he knew he was made for.
Chip Dodd/The Voice of the Heart
Reflections From My Porch Swing 