Desire, Longing, and Hope

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. There's a thing called desire. Desire is the hunger for life within you that has nothing to do with you, on any level. It's creation itself beating the drum. It's the heartbeat of life within you. It is life hungering for itself. It's biological and it's creation itself, so it's spiritual. It's creation. God made you to desire the life you're made to have. Alright? Now unless you admit how much you have it, you're not gonna admit and recognize how dangerous you are too. Desire is even down to the brain stem. Down to the brain stem, like, down to the brain stem is I'm drowning. You come out to save me. You need to know all the techniques of saving a drowning person because I will unintentionally, in my brain stem you at risk to save me. Because I'm not thinking anymore. It's just it's just simply life seeking itself. It's terrible. But it's there. Okay? Like, whoo. We're amazing creatures. We're dangerous creatures. But we're full of desire creatures. We're desirous creatures. That desire is not moral, it's not immoral, it's life seeking itself. It's simply The heart beat, the pause, the hunger for life, what a person does when they faint, doing whatever we gotta do to get to where we gotta go. I mean, it's all of those kinds of things. It's life force. Longings are spiritual in nature. Longings are almost purely spiritual. Longings are the recognition in the imagination that God gave us of how life is made to be. You and I are actually made for the longings to be fulfilled. We long for justice. We long for hope. We long for safety. We long for peace. Just a fighter. Just, I mean, just a fighter. But he fought every day. Wife, me, everybody. Just fight, fight, fight. Right, yeah. Until he had to fight him. You know? Place that wasn't here, longing for justice. Guys, there's no justice. There's some justice, but there's no ultimate justice here. There's no it's all gonna be right here. But do we not push for it, even though we're not gonna have it? See, a longing is a taste of something that is true, but you can't have all of it. We long for home. You can make the most beautiful territory of what you call a place of rest and comfort where you are at your being's ease, and yet you hear a crack in the wall. And you wonder, that's something leaking. Do you see? Home. You know, it's everything's just right in that then something gets anxious in you. You see? Much homelessness is an addiction. See, because if you give a person who's homeless resigned to not having to be anxious because of hopelessness, you give a person a bed, a job, a checkbook, you're giving them danger. You're giving them anxiety. You're giving them hope of a home when they are practicing not letting themselves have it. You give them anxiety. That's the recognition that this could mess up. This could turn out badly. This could be like it was before. This is gonna repeat itself. And some of you remember the song of the country singer that, awakens a homeless guy. Thermometer reads five below, the the clouds are spitting snow, and he wakes up the guy, says, you know, you gotta get up or you're freezing. He said, why didn't you leave me alone? I was almost home. Because he was dreaming about something about the honeybees, running from the honeybees, smelling and it was 1955. The last time he smelled or felt home was 1955. So he said I was almost home. Why didn't you let me die? So I wouldn't have to do this. A longing to go home. You see? So longing is, hunger and a taste of what we can have, but we're not going to get it here. So you've got to be you've got to be willing to have pain if you're going to be a person of longing. So you see longings are about a willingness to have pain because you're always gonna be lonely for a justice that's never here, a peace that never fully comes, a home that you can't have, and a safety that doesn't exist, except a little. So you're gonna be lonely and hurt and sad, you see? So, well, shoot. I don't wanna go there. Well, you can't have a full spiritual life unless you do. And you can't live a a ferocious life on this earth and you unless you accept that you're on earth and there's no cure and this place is not my home. Hope is the eternal flame that can't stop believing things are going to get better. It's the eternal flame that cannot stop believing things are gonna get better. Suicide, for example, is not a condition of hopelessness. It's a hatred of hoping. See, because the thing that is is the most essential rooted thing in us is to wish for a life to have a life in life. As Phil says Phil Harness here, but Phil said that everything that carries life in it wants life. I call it DNA and all those kinds of things, but everything that's alive wants to live. And hope is the agent within a human being seeking fulfillment. Okay? So when a person commits suicide, they're shooting, so to speak, hope. It's fury against how I'm made. Your feelings can go numb. Your needs can be numbed out, anesthetized. The desire can be shut down inside of you. Your longing needs to be turned so far down. They're like, not there, but your hope won't stop. You can't blow it out. And the last day you could do is just kill it. So, is a condition of helplessness over what to do with I can't become hopeless. It won't stop. So it's a it's a it's an active fury, even if it's committed in deep appearance of depression. Okay. So that is the spiritual root system, and and hope is that thing that keeps us coming back. And hope leads us back to feelings. Every time you hope something, you feel afraid, because hope is wanting something you don't have. So look, spiritual root system, soon as you get to hope, it comes back around and starts it all over again. K. You're never gonna stop thinking. Guess what? You're never gonna stop feeling. And your feelings matter more than your thoughts because your thoughts come from your feelings. Your thoughts come from what you want. And most of us spend our lives using our brains to hide our hearts, and the spiritual root system says, no. No. No. No. No. Use your brain to express your heart. You go get you back because you're gonna need that heart, that thing within you to be able to swim the river so you can become who you're made to be. So this is you've seen who you're made to be, seen how you're made, so you can wind up doing what you're made to do. Now, the roots reach up to be met, connected. And if they are connected, fed, your roots get fat. K? That's Jeremiah seventeen seven and eight. The full living tree, the roots go into the waters, your roots get fat, you're good with feelings, you're good with desire, you're good with longings, you're good with hope. Even when heat comes, your leaves are still green. Even when drought comes, you're going to bear fruit. And you're connected to others who will encourage you when you're discouraged. Because they call it encouragement because courage is in a supply that needs to be recouraged. Discourage is when you're low on courage and need somebody to encourage you. See, we're made to feed each other. Heart to heart. Head to heart. Heart to head. God to heart. Right? And your And your best thinking will destroy your heart unless you use your thinking to express your experiences within. This is the spiritual root system that's made to go from the inside outside, be spoken to other people who also recognize themselves as human, and then you grow into someone who becomes more capable of not quitting when life is hard. And everybody around us is looking for somebody who doesn't run away, just like when we were little. And most of us, or many of us, have been running away from ourselves. And so the spiritual root system is a return to how you're made, or a continuation of growing how you're made, so you can join with how others are made and get back to doing what you're made to do.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, anxiety, depression, or burnout, please reach out to the Center for Professional Excellence for Health. For more than twenty years, CBE's long term residential treatment programs have been helping professional men recover their lives, marriages, and families. To find out more, visit cpenashville.com.