-The Invisible Realities-

Wistful and melancholy and sad, today. 
No definable reason. 
Days like this puzzle me and I wonder if the answer has something to do with the fact that I'm not Home yet. 
I'm an eternal soul inhabiting time; a citizen of heaven bound to earth by chains which WILL break, but when or how I have no clue. 
A wistful heart, then, shouldn't be all that surprising sometimes I guess.
Beauty does it, often. Does beauty ever make you ache? I've been longing to just get out and sit on a canoe in a lake, or hike the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee to waterfalls like my family did often when I was young, or lie in a green field with the sky above me for a whole afternoon, or sit by a fire in the woods until late at night. There's a beauty in creation that whispers of the creator and it makes me long for Him, I think, and perhaps that's why sometimes it makes me ache. It's hard to understand, harder to explain, and makes me feel silly when I try.  John Eldredge expressed it this way: 

“Beauty is transcendent. It is our most immediate experience of the eternal. Think of what it’s like to behold a gorgeous sunset, or the ocean at dawn. Remember the ending of a great story. We yearn to linger, to experience it all our days. Sometimes the beauty is so deep it pierces us with longing. For what? For life as it was meant to be. Beauty reminds us of an Eden we have never known, but somehow know our hearts were created for. Beauty speaks of heaven to come, when all shall be beautiful. It haunts us with eternity. Beauty says, There is a glory calling to you.”

Another thing that makes me feel melancholy; love. :) Sometimes when I hear a love story, no matter how predictable or sappy, it just makes me ache with the beauty and wonder of it. I've never been in love, so I don't suppose I can really understand and maybe that's why it's such a fascinating mystery to me. But the ache? Oh sometimes I think it's just because God hasn't brought me a love of my own yet but then other times I think it's because human love whispers to us of something far, far deeper: the whole reason God invented it was to give us the picture of His relationship with us, His people. And so the passion a man and woman feel towards each other is but a foretaste of the passion and ecstasy we will feel in the presence of God. It makes me anticipate marriage, because I think it will help me understand God's heart towards me better. I think when I experience that kind of love it will make me feel great awe, great worshipfulness, at the love of the heavenly Groom for his earthly Bride. Jim Elliot understood this. He wrote in his journal:

‎"Kiss me, Heavenly Lover, in the morning.
Be Thou the first to sweeten
This whole day's speech with that warm, honeyed touch
Of Thy caress.
And tenderly, while yet each eye lies unawaked,
Come lightly and impart to them
For day's long hour a heavenly set
To see all things as through a lover's eyes,
By soft caresses from the lips of Him
Who lives in Paradise.
Kiss me, Christ of Beauty, here alone
The two of us, while dawn
Steals down the slopes and
Wakens day's bright eye to smile on me.
Let not its luring draw me from the sense
That I belong to the One
Whose first embrace full ravishes
Who has kissed the son." 

So, I guess the wistfulness inside is just the result that occurs when things I experience on earth--things like love or beauty--stir in my heart a longing for the Invisible Realities.

He has set eternity in my heart, and though it aches, I'm glad of it.