What Are We Really Longing For?
What we experience as sexual longing may contain within it a deeper longing—a desire for complete union, complete intimacy, complete knowing and being known.
Sexual union can answer that longing, powerfully and beautifully, for a moment. But it can’t finally satisfy it, because maybe the thing we ultimately desire is bigger than any other human experience.
As an adoptee, I’ve contemplated a similar thought before in the context of human bonding.
Intimate connection begins in the womb. A baby experiences the “oneness” of his mother’s body—her warmth, her voice, her heartbeat. They even share nourishment.
After birth, a nursing infant is drawn again into that intimate place of closeness—held against his mother’s warm body, sharing one another’s scent, nourished at her breast, gazing into her face. There is reciprocity of intense love and emotion.
Interestingly, God Himself uses this most tender of human bonds to help us understand something of His own love for His children:
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)
And elsewhere He says,
“As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.” (Isaiah 66:13)
Perhaps even this most primal human experience—the warmth, nourishment, comfort, and security of being held by a mother—was always meant to teach us something about the heart of God.
Attachment Theory
Even our biology is designed for attachment. Oxytocin plays an important role in childbirth and nursing and is also released during sexual intimacy and climax. These are very different relationships and interactions, of course, but both involve remarkably powerful experiences of human attachment, closeness, and bonding.
And perhaps even climax—with its momentary experience of overwhelming pleasure, surrender, and union—contains a small taste of a future ecstasy for which we have no other earthly comparison. Not because our union with Christ will be sexual, of course (Matt 22:30), but because God may have woven into our bodies temporary earthly experiences that give us a faint vocabulary for a joy and communion we cannot yet comprehend.
I’ve often dreamed of the day when I will be held by my Creator in the same tender, loving embrace with which I held my own nursing infants years ago. I’ve sometimes wondered whether being adopted created that particular longing in me—a hunger for a kind of belonging and closeness that is difficult to put into words.
But I think it may go deeper.
Broken Attachments
Because we don’t only experience the beauty of human bonding. We also know the ache of bonds that are broken.
Death can suddenly rip from our arms someone we desperately want to keep holding. Divorce can grievously tear apart what was joined. Abandonment and estrangement can leave gaping wounds of rejection—a lingering empty place where love, belonging, and connection should live.
And adoption, beautiful as it can be, begins with profound loss. Before there can be the joy of being welcomed into another family, there has first been sorrow and separation—a primal bond broken between mother and child.
Maybe something deep within us recognizes every one of these ruptures for what it is: the agonizing absence of something we were created to have. And maybe that ache points beyond our human relationships too.
The biblical story begins with man in communion with God. There was no hiding. No shame. No separation. But sin ruptured that communion. Adam and Eve hid from the One whose presence they had been created to enjoy… and humanity has lived with separation ever since—from God, from one another, and eventually, through death, even from our own bodies.
Maybe every broken human bond carries a faint echo of that greater rupture. And maybe every longing for reunion is a whisper of the restoration still to come.
Because something interesting happens as we grow older. Hormones shift. The intense urgency of certain physical desires may quiet or relax. And yet the deep longing for intimacy—for closeness, for absolute belonging, to know and to be fully known (and still loved)—doesn’t quiet with them.
If anything, the spirit may become even more eager.
I wonder if, with age, we begin to recognize more clearly what the body was actually reaching for. Maybe that longing was never only about human attachment.
As intense as a mother’s love is for her precious infant, and as powerful as the heated desire for union between husband and wife can be, perhaps neither is the thing itself.
Maybe they are foreshadowings—created experiences that give us faint glimpses of a communion we have never yet known in its fullness.
Paul says something interesting after quoting Genesis about husband and wife becoming one flesh:
“This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:32)
Maybe we’ve sometimes looked at that backward.
I don’t think our union with Christ is being compared to marriage simply because marriage happens to be an especially intimate human relationship.
The Ache to Be Held
Rather, marriage was designed from the beginning to point to Him.
Does the ache to be held, the longing to belong, the desire to know and be completely known—even the almost overwhelming human desire to become “one” with another person—all whisper of something beyond ourselves?
Not sexual union with God, of course. Something infinitely greater than sexuality, for which sexuality may simply give us one earthly vocabulary.
Throughout Scripture, God gives His people earthly glimpses of realities that will only be complete in His presence. Perhaps some of our deepest experiences of love, attachment, intimacy, and union are among them—not heaven itself, but little foretastes woven into creation that teach our hearts to long for something more.
Because the story of Scripture seems to be moving toward communion.
Face to Face
From Eden, where God dwelt with man, through the terrible separation of sin; to the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us; to the Spirit dwelling within His people; and finally to the breathtaking promise.
“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people…” (Revelation 21:3)
And again…
“They will see his face.” (Revelation 22:4)
Paul describes that same hope in words that seem especially meaningful:
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Face to face. Fully knowing and fully known—perfectly loved.
Maybe that’s what the heart has been reaching for.
Because what if this whole human journey—the entire adventure with its highs and lows—is filled with hints and foretastes of the eternal joy to come?
Perhaps some of the strongest desires we experience in these bodies are not destinations at all. They are glimpses. Appetites. Echoes of something we cannot yet comprehend—the mysterious joy of perfect communion with Him.
All along, we’ve simply been “homesick” for the warmth of our Father’s heavenly house.
