When It Hurts to Hope: Honest Conversations about Living with Unmet Longing

By Rachel Miller

Embrace the tension of unmet longing and choose hope—even when life doesn’t look like you thought it would.

Maybe you’ve chosen to bury your dreams, denying your desires and sleepwalking through life. Maybe you’ve let your longing take the driver’s seat and now you feel frantic and out of control. Even worse, you find yourself growing cold to God, wondering, If I never get what I want, is God still good? This book tackles that hard question—and many others.

When It Hurts to Hope will show you the middle ground between burying your longings and overindulging them. Rachel Miller offers encouragement and practical advice on how to honor God and honor your desires at the same time, sharing tools for readers to be emotionally and spiritually healthy. Through storytelling, Scripture, and humor, this book will help you choose hope in tough seasons like unwanted singleness, infertility, chronic illness, and career frustrations. Ultimately, Jesus is the only one who can meet every longing. Delayed dreams can deepen our intimacy with God while we hope for the day when he wipes away every tear and heals every heartache.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781684268740

Book preview

part1

Patience: a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

—Ambrose Bierce¹

Red neon lights cast a warm glow under the awning, which was weatherworn, scallop-edged, and robin’s egg blue. The tears in my eyes blurred my vision as I stared at the lettering above it: The Bluebird Cafe. I was parked in front of Nashville’s iconic stage that every songwriter and country star is proud to play.

But I wasn’t entirely sure how I got there. I certainly wasn’t there to have a good time. Thirty minutes earlier, I had been at a party across town. I had spotted an attractive guy across the room and worked up the courage to walk over and strike up a conversation. Things seemed to be going well until our chat hit a three-second lull and he up and left. He turned his back and walked away without a word of warning.

Stunned and embarrassed, I sat, frozen. The voices of insecurity began to scream in my head. What is wrong with you? You must have bored him to death! You knew you didn’t have a chance with that guy.

I set down my drink, walked to the front door, and fished for my car keys before the first hot, salty tear could slide down my cheek.

I drove around Nashville while indulging in a good old-fashioned ugly cry (not a great coping strategy, for the record). Somehow, I ended up in a deserted parking lot in front of The Bluebird Cafe.

Completely alone.

Crying out to God.

Begging him to show up.

Telling him how scared and confused I was.

Again.

Okay, okay—I know what you’re thinking. Wow, Rachel. A bit of an overreaction, don’t you think? But you see, this wasn’t one out-of-the-blue rejection. It was another blow to the chest in an exhausting sparring match commonly referred to as dating. It was another moment of crushed hope. Another bullet point to add to my growing list of reasons to give up on this stupid process, become a nun, and live in isolation for the rest of my days.

Yes, that is indeed a note of bitterness you detect. I’m not proud of it. I was suffering from a condition that King Solomon diagnosed thousands of years ago in his collection of wise sayings: Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life (Prov. 13:12 ESV). Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a wife and a mom. But after graduating from college and looking around for my life partner, he was nowhere to be found. The single years dragged on, and I battled the fear that I would end up alone, forever, never having the chance to fulfill the roles I craved. I had done everything I knew to honor God, do things his way, take responsibility for my life, and still, I was alone. For an entire decade, I had nothing to show for my dating escapades except a series of heartbreaks and tons of material for stand-up comedy.

I was waiting on a hope that seemed infinitely far away. I was fed up, weak, and weary. So naturally, I called my mom a lot.

Thanks, Mom

Like many good things in my life, the idea for this book was sparked during a conversation with my mom. I was on my way to yet another first date with someone I met on an app, and I called her to whine. Would this man be the love of my life? Or would he murder me?

You should write about dating, my mom suggested. I’m sure you’d have a lot of good things to say.

Trust me, I shot back. "I have nothing good to say about dating."

"Well, you should at least try." She had that classic mom tone of voice that’s equal parts I believe in you, honey, and This pity party is over.

So, I started trying. At first, I wrote to cleanse my soul of angst and frustration and sadness. But slowly, God opened my eyes, shifted my thinking, and channeled this writing into a deeper search for answers. I started talking about my struggles more openly with my single friends. I can’t tell you how many amazing men and women I’ve met in the past ten years who are frustrated by the search we undergo to fulfill one of our most basic, God-given desires: finding a life partner. That friend and teammate who helps you do things like take out a mortgage and pay taxes and raise babies and share the gift of sexual intimacy—a drive that most followers of Christ suppress or express in unhealthy ways during years and years of searching.

Along the way, I realized it’s not just singles who live with unmet longing—this nagging pull shows up in every human heart. If you’re reading this and you are married, you might be tempted to offer some wise words here—something like It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be, okay? Your words reveal a different kind of heartache. You found the one, but now you’re feeling stuck and lonely in an empty marriage, wondering if you made some horrible mistake. You’re still longing for intimacy. Perhaps you are crushed by the pain of infertility, terrified that you’ll never be able to have a child. Or maybe your unmet longing is more about your physical suffering. Perhaps you’ve been at war with a disease in your body for months or years, with no end in sight. Or you could be chasing a lifelong work dream, inches away from giving up.

No matter your age, nationality, background, or stage of life, unmet longing is heavy.

A Bruised Soul

The pain of hope deferred feels like a massive bruise on my soul. It doesn’t hurt all the time, but now and then something touches it, triggers it, and sends a shock down my spine. A friend calls in a giddy flutter to announce that she and her boyfriend went ring shopping. A coworker raves about how adorable her five-year-old is. Or—this is a good one—a guy ghosts you mid-conversation at a party. Those moments press against a raw nerve and trigger the pain. You don’t want to be bitter, to always turn others’ joys into your sorrows. It just feels like a gut reaction that happens without your consent. As time drags on, you’re reminded of that pain daily, perhaps even hourly. You question your mental wellness, and you heap shame on yourself for being so preoccupied with this desire. You suspect there’s something seriously wrong with you.

And no matter what you tell yourself, no matter how you choose to cope with the frustration and fear, the desire doesn’t go away. Longing is intrinsic to being human. It’s not an accidental aspect of who we are; it’s part of how we reflect the image of God. Our desires are indicators that something is missing. Just as our bodies use physical sensations to tell us that we need something (Thirsty? Drink some water! Tired? Go to sleep!), our emotional, mental, and spiritual desires alert us that we have unmet needs. Loneliness is meant to drive us to connection. Fear is meant to drive us to security.

This book is for people who have embraced their God-given responsibility to do what they can to get the (good) things they want. For example, I’ve met a lot of single women who are waiting for God to bring them the one and are passive about their part in the search. Unless you want to marry the DoorDash guy, you’re going to end up alone. The same goes for those chasing a career dream or health. God expects us to steward our lives with agency and wisdom. We are free to make choices and make moves—enroll in a program, download an app, adopt healthy habits. Many of us get trapped in our unmet longing not because we don’t have options but because we’re stuck in a victim mindset, held captive by bad theology, or frozen by past trauma.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

But what do you do when you do all the things, check all the boxes, and still get frustrated in your search? Here’s a difficult truth: our best efforts to satisfy our heart’s desires can be frustrated, thwarted, or take way longer than we ever anticipated. The presence of longing does not guarantee that it will be met or that it will be met quickly. One of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis, describes our predicament this way: A man’s physical hunger does not prove that he will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.²

This is the tension, the weight, that I want to address. If you, like me in my season of singleness, feel like you’re drifting on an abandoned raft in an ocean of unmet longing, how do you honor your desires and honor God at the same time? How do you apply the gospel of Jesus Christ to your situation? If God is both loving and powerful, why doesn’t he give us what feels so fundamental to being human? How do we live in hope, in confidence, but make sure that we’ve placed our confidence in the right person and a guaranteed outcome?

The scary part, for me, lies just one step further. It’s when I come face-to-face with this question: If I don’t get what I want, do I still believe that God is good?

This book is not about fixing the problem. I’m not going to share ten dating tips for finding your soulmate. You won’t find any diet or supplement ideas for curing your chronic disease or increasing your chances of conception.

The question I am attempting to answer—the question that has sent me on a deep dive into Scripture and my own perplexed heart—is this: How do you deal with unmet longing? How do you honor a good desire, hope that it comes to fruition, and still trust that if your dreams don’t come true, God is still good?

How do we live in the tension of not yet?

Or, worse: How do we keep living well when the answer is no?

And not just live, but thrive. I want to be a woman who greets each day with enthusiasm and strength, walking in the good works that my heavenly Father has prepared for me. I want identity and security that doesn’t change based on how my life is going.

I am longing for more, and I pray that you’ve picked up this book because you’re longing for more, too.

What Do We Mean by Longing?

Unless you write sappy romance novels or enjoy archaic English, my guess is you don’t use the word longing very often. Let’s make sure we’re clear on what it means.

A longing is a sweet and persistent ache for something forgotten or missing. It’s deep desire with a touch of urgency. It’s a craving for something just out of reach. It’s putting together a puzzle, discovering there’s one piece missing, and knowing the puzzle won’t be complete until it’s found. Sometimes, our longings are subtle, like whispers of a forgotten memory. Sometimes, our longings are intense, burning fires that threaten to consume.

Beauty awakens longing in me. The other night I was writing in a cozy coffee shop in downtown Franklin, Tennessee, just a few miles from where I live. It began to rain while I wrote. On my way back to the car, I strolled up and down the quaint streets and passed store signs, glowing streetlamps, and brick facades as thunder rumbled in the distance. Occasionally, a lightning bolt slashed through the velvet dark sky, illuminating the world with a flash of blinding light. On one street corner, a young man played a bittersweet tune on a violin. I savored the piercing music that blended with the pitter-patter of the rain and the fleeting power of a thunderstorm, and as the beauty slipped through my fingers, I realized: this is longing—a desire for goodness that’s just out of reach.

But longing isn’t just intangible and emotional. God designed us to function as a unified whole, meaning that our physical drives and our soul longings are intertwined. Your desire to feel a lover’s touch caressing your skin is connected to your desire for companionship, to be found beautiful, to be desired. Even our cravings for food and drink are connected to our need for safety and comfort.

Longing is uniquely human. Other species have needs and appetites, but no other species have the type of soul cravings that human beings experience. This is because we are imago Dei, made in the image of God, with a seemingly infinite capacity for desire. King Solomon wrote, He has . . . set eternity in the human heart (Eccles. 3:11). Our longings reveal the architecture of our soul. We were made for companionship, for purpose, for abundant life.

For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on our good, God-given desires. But we must recognize how our longings become twisted, how we take matters into our own hands to satisfy ourselves outside of God’s plans for our good. A longing for companionship may lead you to sleep with your married coworker, despite the damage it will cause to his family (not to mention your own soul). Your longing for acceptance might drive you to chase fame and adoration. All of this is because a little thing happened in a place called the Garden of Eden that shattered the perfect order of the world and sent us reeling. Sin entered the world, and everything, including our desires, was corrupted by evil.

Our deep desires are echoes of Eden. God uses them to draw us back to him. We know that the world is not right, and we long for it to be restored to original glory. When we are healthy and in touch with our desires, we can see them as a gift, as a constant tug on our hearts to return to him, over and over, recognizing our deep dependence. Like the Israelites receiving manna in the wilderness, we can choose to fear what each new day brings, or we can look forward to each day with excitement and ask, How will God provide today?

A Short Foreign Language Lesson

I’m a word nerd. My first real job was teaching Spanish, so I can’t help but toss in a few foreign language vocab words (don’t worry—I won’t make you conjugate anything).

As previously mentioned, C. S. Lewis was also fascinated by the concept of longing. He wrote about a haunting German word, sehnsucht, that he translated to English as An inconsolable longing for we know not what.³ Lewis believed that our longings, especially the ones that cannot be satisfied, are one of the greatest pieces of evidence for the existence of God. He writes: If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.⁴

You know this feeling, right? It’s the experience of saying goodbye to your best friends at the end of a wonderful trip—the joy of the memories you’ve made and the sadness of separation rushing through you at the same time. It’s the feeling of home that comes from sitting around a campfire, carrying on deep conversations, all the while knowing the embers will burn out and this moment will pass. It’s the potential of perfection that fades from view as soon as you catch a glimpse of it.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: you and I carry within us a longing for a better existence that we won’t see this side of the grave. Followers of Jesus journey through this life longing for a better country (Heb. 11:16).

The good news? If we are in Christ, we will one day reach that country. One day, we will come home, every tear will be wiped away, and every unmet longing will be lifted off our chest. We will share in Christ’s resurrection power, which theologian N. T. Wright describes as life after life after death.⁵

Yes, in this life, you will sometimes get what you want. But not always. And, if I may speak directly, even if you get what you want—the ring on your finger, the promotion, the