Your Longing Has a Name

Come Alive to the Story You Were Made For

Dominic Done

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780785251880
• Subtopic: Religion

Have you ever wondered who God had in mind before you came to be? Dominic Done examines seven gifts that, when practiced through the help of the Holy Spirit, will restore you, cause you to flourish, and empower you to come alive to the story you were made for.

How is the health of your soul? Is the deepest part of you flourishing—or is it languishing and gasping for air? Life lately has been filled with exhausting challenges: personal loss, political division, economic turmoil, faith deconstruction, and isolation. And our soul feels it.

Yet in the face of uncertainty, the Bible assures us we can thrive inwardly. Jesus promised his followers the abundant life. But how do we find it? How can we flourish in difficult times?

In Your Longing Has a Name, author Dominic Done casts a beautiful vision of hope, revealing seven gifts God has provided for the health of the soul. He weaves together

• A unique approach to understanding our purpose
• Fresh language designed for current times of crisis and spiritual uncertainty
• Soulful theology that focuses on our identity in Christ rather than rules-based legalism
• Deeply moving personal stories, biblical insights, and relatable discussions on the human ache for meaning
• Examples from history, literature, art, and culture

Your Longing Has a Name paints a picture of hope during a time of crisis and confusion and helps us find ways for our soul to come alive.

1.

STEP INTO THE STORY

God will still sing to you and call you by name into greater being and fullness of life. It will feel like longing.

—LISA COLÓN DELAY¹

Late on a Tuesday evening in 2011, a columnist for the Atlantic, David Hajdu, was sitting in the Village Vanguard, a New York jazz club, doing some research on the city’s music scene. The band launched into a song when a stylishly dressed trumpeter in an Italian-cut suit stepped forward and began a spectacular solo. Up to that point, he had been turned from the audience.

David Hajdu was stunned: Is that Wynton Marsalis?

How could the world’s most renowned jazz musician, and the winner of nine Grammy Awards, be playing as a sideman in a hardly known band? And yet it was unmistakably him. Hajdu sat in the dark room, mesmerized as Marsalis’s unique style, resonance, and breathtaking range stole the show.

The fourth song, a moody 1930s ballad called “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You,” featured another solo. Describing it as a “wrenching act of creative expression,” Hajdu was spellbound as Marsalis not only played but also physically and emotionally embodied the spirit of the song. As he approached the end of the performance, his fingers sauntered fluently over every note. The crowd leaned forward eagerly.

Seconds before the most anticipated moment, the air charged with pent-up applause, someone’s cell phone rang. It wasn’t just an ordinary ring; it was an absurdly shrill, repetitive jingle that gets glued in your head. Awkwardness ensued as people turned to glare at the flustered offender. He quickly moved to silence the phone, but the damage was done.

Hajdu jotted in his notebook: “Magic, ruined.”²

WHEN YOUR SOUL IS WEARY

Magic, ruined.

I can’t help but think of those words when I reflect on the human experience and how our individual lives are often caught off guard by life’s intrusions. We’ve all been there. Especially, it seems, over the last few years.

Disruption has come to us through a pandemic: the sting of grief and loss; trying to navigate work, school, and church via Zoom; racial, social, and political tension; global unrest and economic anxiety; not to mention the complex emotional struggles each of us has waded through. This has been a time of turmoil at every level, and our souls feel it.

Maybe for you, a relationship has been shattered because of a political disagreement, or a career you invested in for years dissolved because of budget cuts. An addiction you thought you’d buried suddenly reemerged during months of lockdown, or your trust in God has buckled under the weight of deconstruction. Whatever you’re dealing with, there’s no doubt that you join the overwhelming majority of us who now know what it’s like when the magic is ruined.

Recent polls in the United States reveal how we’re struggling physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally:

• 75 percent are overwhelmed by stress³
• 72 percent are exhausted⁴
• 68 percent feel defeated⁵
• 67 percent struggle with loneliness⁶
• 48 percent say they’re hopeless⁷

The number of people who believe their lives are “thriving” has dropped to a low not seen since the Great Recession.⁸ According to Harvard University, 51 percent of young Americans say they’re discouraged. In the same survey, the majority describe having little energy, struggling with sleep, or finding “little pleasure in doing things.”⁹ It’s almost like we’re living NF’s haunting song “I’ll Keep On.” Our souls are tired.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong.

Maybe what we’re seeing and experiencing is a collective fatigue that goes well beyond whatever’s happening out there; it’s more like something inside us is broken. The spiritual writer Thomas Moore once said the “great malady” of the modern age is “loss of soul.”¹⁰ If true, that’s a more harrowing diagnosis than you may realize. Your soul is everything. If your soul is flourishing, nothing you go through can destroy you. If your soul is crumbling, nothing you go through can heal you. The health of your soul shapes the outcome of your life.

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THE HEALTH OF YOUR SOUL SHAPES THE OUTCOME OF YOUR LIFE.

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You’ll know when something is wrong with your soul. How? It might manifest as negative thinking, restlessness, abrupt changes in emotion, an underlying sense of anxiety, disconnection from others, indifference, lack of aspiration, or burnout that no amount of sleep or time off can fix. A disordered soul is perpetually weary. In so many conversations lately, when I ask friends how they’re really doing, they reply with a single word: exhausted.

Can you relate?

I’m not just talking about the kind of fatigue you have from staying up late, bingeing Netflix, or not having enough caramel macchiatos to jump-start your day. I’m talking about a soul-fatigue you endure in a visceral, all-of-life way. There is a kind of weariness that hits you in your gut: a gnawing, restless ache that tells you something is deeply wrong.

A recent article in the New York Times described our emotional state as “languishing.” Languishing is a feeling of “stagnation and emptiness,” the unshakable sense you’re merely surviving instead of thriving.¹¹ Languishing is lostness. It’s a lot like the German word unheimlich, or as the philosopher Heidegger put it, a profound sense of “not-being-at-home.”¹² It’s the restlessness that comes when you’re lonely, adrift, or out of place. You might feel cold, numb, or indifferent; you scarcely remember the fire that once drove you to dream, risk, and step out.

A while back I had a chat with someone who was walking through a season of loss, which led to a crisis of faith. He admitted the problem wasn’t that he felt too much but that he felt too little. His struggles had left him emotionally detached and spiritually disoriented.

“I just feel so empty.”

As he continued to share, my heart went out to him. I recalled Jesus’ invitation for the weary and burdened: “Come to me . . . for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28–29).

When Jesus promises rest, he doesn’t mean a longer vacation, a lighter schedule, or a break from the office. He’s speaking of a place where your inner life thrives and blooms with virtue. It’s the possibility of green pastures and still waters that David foreshadowed in Psalm 23:3: “He restores my soul” (NKJV).

TO FLOURISH AGAIN

But how do we find such a life? Are these just poetic words, or a reality to step into? Can our souls be restored to flourishing again?

A simple prayer in the book of 3 John whispers yes: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (verse 2 NKJV).

These words first struck me in 2020, when I found myself battling my own season of soul-fatigue. My family and I were living in Portland, Oregon, and I was doing my best to navigate our church through the pandemic—all while the region was rocked by violent riots, seething political tension, and historic wildfires that burned through vast parts of the state. It was one of the most discouraging seasons I’d ever gone through. Everywhere I turned, people were angry: angry about the virus, the election, shutdowns, social issues, injustice, the economy, protests, and Facebook posts.

Especially Facebook posts.

I met with people whose decades-long relationships had evaporated because of what others said online. They shared how toxic social media had become, how hurt they’d been by so-and-so’s comments, and how alone they felt. Some joined virtual mobs, attacking, shaming, and canceling politicians or public figures. Others vented their anger on pastors and churches: attacking them for opening too soon, or not being open enough, requiring masks or not requiring masks, being too political, or not political enough.

I’m sure part of the angst emerged from sheer boredom. People were sick of being told what to do, sick of being stuck in their houses, sick of having to do school and work in front of a computer. Part of it also had to do with pent-up grief. As of September 2021, 72 percent of Americans say they know someone who was either killed or hospitalized during the pandemic.¹³ In my extended family we lost several family members in a matter of months, including my mother-in-law, who died on Christmas.

Not long after, my wife suffered a spontaneous lung collapse. She spent several weeks in the hospital and months at home recovering. I remember one particularly intense day in the hospital just after her second operation to try to repair her lung. She woke up in excruciating pain. Every breath flooded her eyes with tears. I sat there helplessly, holding her hand, straining for the words to encourage her. But the truth was, at that moment, I didn’t have much to give.

I felt so inadequate to handle everything that was being thrown at our family in that season. My wife’s health. Our grief at losing her mother. Panic attacks. The pressures of work. At every turn there were disgruntled people. Night after night I struggled with insomnia as my mind raced: God, what are you doing? Why are you allowing all of this? How do I overcome this discouragement? Like an entropy of the soul, the more I grasped for answers, the more they eluded me.

One morning, after another restless night, I picked up my Bible and read those words in 3 John: Beloved, I pray that you may prosper . . . just as your soul prospers.

At first it seemed like a sarcastic joke. Prosper? Really?

My life, and the lives of so many other people I knew, felt anything but prosperous. What does prospering even mean? I wondered. I thought of the prosperity preachers on TV who insist God’s purpose for our lives must be to make all our wildest dreams come true: Just rub the shiny lamp, buy the right books, say the right words or prayers, and presto! You’ll drive a Tesla and date a supermodel, and your team will always win. Because God only wants you to be happy. Right?

If only. The coziest lies are the ones I want to believe.

I knew the verse had to mean something else.

I looked at it again, decided to do a little research, and discovered the word prosper has nothing to do with a better paycheck or a bigger 401(k). It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Leave the Parachute
• Chapter 1: Step Into the Story
• Chapter 2: To Be Fully Alive
• Chapter 3: Into the Deep
• Chapter 4: Breathe Again
• Chapter 5: Live Without Walls
• Chapter 6: Confronting Your Shadow Side
• Chapter 7: Unstoppable
• Chapter 8: Castles of the Mind
• Chapter 9: Closer Than a Brother
• Chapter 10: Between Two Faces
• The Story You Were Made For
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author