"Our journey begins with longing. And before longing is the longing to long. It is the yearning to desire Him. We find in our hearts an awakening that beckons longing and paves the way for desire. It begins with the Lord Himself placing His divine drawing upon the heart of the one who loves Him. We find ourselves desiring to desire Him and pained by the present shallowness of our hearts. He awakens us to the great obsession of Himself, and we find this new ache within our hearts: our lack of love and absence of tenderness. We begin to hunger for the capacity to hunger. We begin to thirst for the ability to thirst. The longing to long is the escort into longing itself. It is the God-ordained gateway into the true gift of God to crave Him with all of our beings. With hearts empowered by a divine ache, we cry out for more of God. We search for any sign of Him. This is the precise position that He wants us to be in. It is the hungry that He fills. It is the desirous that He satisfies. All divine longing is a gift. The longing prior to the felt-experience is just as much a part of loving Him as the experience itself. They go hand in hand and cannot be separated. The initial longing is an irreplaceable part of the eternal intimacy. Both the craving and the satisfaction are equal parts of the gift of intimacy. He is cultivating longing in your heart. He desires more than a recognition of His greatness; He wants a desperation and lovesick yearning to come to maturity within you. And so for a time you remain in this breach between the reach for and the fulfillment of superior pleasures. He is enlarging the capacity of our hearts to experience the pleasure of His presence by withholding it." -dana candler

It takes God to love God, and He Himself must place within us the love with which we love Him. "...For it is God who works in you both to will [desire] and to do for His good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13).

"lovers bloom in the arid desert wind. we are traveling across a vast desert. we didnt choose the desert. it chose us. it is in our bones. we are the children of abraham, of isaac, of jacob. we are a nomadic people called to pilgrimage. at times, we may deny the desert. with enough music and singing and dancing and laughter, we might just drown out the pangs deep within our soul. yet sometimes, the deep longing throbs loud enough to wake us up and remind us of our soul-parching thirst for the fountain of divine love. in these moments of absolute weakness, of absolute dependence, we can do nothing but simply ache for the presence of God. this helplessness, this longing, this desire, is a sign that love has already reached out to use and is drawing us ever closer, ever upward into His heart. but the desert has so drained us that we are too weak to try to impress Him. we cannot perform amazing feats of prayer and fasting. we cannot muster the strength to stand tall and go charging forth as valiant warriors. instead, like a mumbling drunk or dying Savior, we simply cry out, "i thirst." and He comes and satisfies our thirst with a spring of love that knows no bounds." -doug floyd