The Life You Long For: Learning to Live from a Heart of Rest

The Life You Long For: Learning to Live from a Heart of Rest

by Christy Nockels
The Life You Long For: Learning to Live from a Heart of Rest

The Life You Long For: Learning to Live from a Heart of Rest

by Christy Nockels

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Overview

A beautiful invitation to discover your place in God's heart and let him set the pace for your life—from a wife and mother, singer-songwriter, and worship leader for Passion Conferences and IF:Gathering

“Christy Nockels is a gentle, strong voice shepherding us into a fuller life with Jesus at the very center. This book will restore your weary soul.”—Jennie Allen, New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head and founder and visionary of IF:Gathering

 
Christy Nockels knows firsthand how easily our desire to serve God—even when using the gifts He has given us—can overshadow our delight in simply being with Him. When God called her to lay down her ministry for a season, Christy was forced to confront how her sense of purpose and worth had become tangled up in her work. God then lovingly invited her to discover true rest in His presence as she learned to live as the Beloved.
 
In The Life You Long For, Christy shows us how to let go of hustle and achievement and instead find our identity in the quiet center of God’s love. As we delight in being with Him, we are filled to overflowing with contentment and love that propel us into an entirely new way of being, one in which every act of service and every encounter with the people around us arise from a heart at rest.
 
With irresistible warmth and grace, this book calls you to step fully into the life you didn’t even realize you’ve been seeking, as you find your highest calling not in a duty to uphold but in a beautiful identity to live out.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780593192566
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/01/2022
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 1,056,879
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Christy Nockels is a worship leader and singer-songwriter with a passion for writing and speaking. Her podcast, The Glorious in the Mundane, inspires listeners to see both their big dreams and the seemingly small things in a whole different way. Nockels has released three albums on the independent label Keeper's Branch Records. Previously, she toured nationwide with her husband, Nathan, as the duo Watermark, recording seven #1 radio singles and five acclaimed albums. The two also have participated in Passion Conferences since their inception. Christy lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with her husband and their three children.

Read an Excerpt

1

His Banner over Me Is Love

Imagine if you and I were to sit down together to get acquainted, and before we begin, someone gives us specific parameters for our conversation, guidelines to help us skip the small talk and go straight to the meaningful and memorable stuff. You and I are challenged to introduce ourselves without alluding to anything we do or have done in terms of a vocation or trade. We are told to focus only on our interior lives and matters of the heart.

To be honest with you from the get-­go, there was a time in my life when such a challenge would have left me a bumbling mess! While I would have been elated to nix the small talk, I would’ve felt stripped bare in having to bypass my exterior world and abandon the crutch of my career, which I have a tendency to lean on when describing who I am. Even now, it might take a few stops and starts for me to find the right words to reveal the heart of who I am.

How about you? How would you introduce yourself to me? I wonder what pieces of your story you might reveal, insights that describe the making of you. Would you be hard pressed for words, maybe even feel small and unseen, if you had to leave out what you do, or would you be relieved in some ways?

What if, after what I’m sure would be a refreshing and revealing introduction, our mediator proposed another prodding challenge? What if we were asked to describe to each other the life we truly long for? However, as we describe our wants and dreams, we cannot include any milestones, accolades, or any level of success we’d hope to achieve. How would you describe the life you long for?

Would you say that your soul seems to ache with something you can’t quite put your finger on? Maybe you’ve achieved some milestones in your exterior world but you’re left with a surprising, insatiable longing for more. Perhaps you’ve had to lay down your career for a season and that has caused an unrest in your soul.

I think we’d both agree that life has become more complicated than we ever imagined, as everywhere we look, we are inundated with conflicting messages. Some say we should rest, some say we should run wholeheartedly after our dreams and never look back, and some urge us to find the balance in between. We feel pulled in more directions than we even knew existed, having given the world twenty-­four-­hour instant access to our psyches and our souls.

Have you become weary amid all these competing pressures? Maybe you started out with a pure devotion to pursue the dreams you believe God placed in your heart but lately it’s begun to look and feel tainted. How often has our devotion turned into busyness and our commitment turned into a craving for recognition? Everywhere we click and scroll, it seems like everyone’s out there doing something big. We feel compelled to take on the pressure to keep building big things too. Then there’s our longing for connection with the people in our lives. Yet family can feel like juggling endless practical responsibilities while stewarding sacred relationships. Our longing for community often becomes a struggle against lives stuffed too full to get our calendars lined up. Or maybe we’ve been burned in some of our dearest relationships. Wounds, both given and received, seem an inevitable result of braving the messy middle of pursuing a life of togetherness.

I’ve experienced all the above—­the chronically overscheduled life, an imbalance between family and work, the pressure to build big things, and even the complications of trying to achieve authentic community. I lacked the ability to be present for anything in my life as I felt compelled to plow through what I know now were precious seasons, just to get to the next seemingly urgent thing. As a new mom, while I was head over heels in love with my family, I mostly felt in over my head about how to truly care for them when I considered how much I also cared about the things that I felt God had placed in my heart to share with the world.

Inevitably, I reached what felt like the end of my own ability and capacity, and I became thoroughly tired. Bone tired. The kind of tired that robs you and me of the very things we long for in this life—­peace, joy, contentment, belonging, and rest.

If you and I did get to sit down to explore these questions together, I bet we’d find that we have more in common than we’d imagined. I also bet we’d bump into a bit of mystery as we got to the bottom of the funnel of who we really are. We’d have to acknowledge a certain sanctity to our lives that we sense but can’t quite put words around, as well as a longing we’re still trying to define. I believe that at some point in our conversation, our Belovedness would inevitably peek through our peripheral shells and the stuff of real life would start spilling out.

Beloved. (I’m going to call you this quite often, so you might want to go ahead and try it on and see how it feels.) This is the one big something that I know is true of you: you are God loved, which is essentially what the name Beloved means. I find it beautiful that God both made us in His image and named us in His image. First John 4:8 says, “God is love,” and then all throughout Scripture you and I are called Beloved—­or as the Greek says, “loved by God.” It’s as if we’re the response to who He is, and right from the start, He is the fulfillment of our greatest need: to be loved.

You’ve likely seen this name Beloved in Scripture. You might even have worn it on a T-­shirt or a necklace. But maybe you’ve become a bit numb to its true hold on you. What if I told you that living from your Belovedness changes everything? That it could unfold the true you as well as give you an unimagined capacity to be about the things of God and the life you’ve longed for. If I showed you how the true you could emerge from a place of contentment and rest, would you be willing to crawl into this kind of chrysalis and yield to the process?

There is such a place, and I’m grateful beyond words that God called me to it, to be able to experience the catapulting capacity of His rest. It was here that I discovered what He truly requires of me and also what He doesn’t. It was here that I was surprised to find what is most valuable to Him as well as some things that I didn’t know were priceless to me. I was also blown away to discover that in finding true rest in God, I’d watch Him unfold the life I was longing for in a way that I could never have dreamed or planned.


Meeting God in the Brokenness

At the end of 2017, I found myself wanting to hold on to every last bit of cozy that celebrating Christmas brings but also ready to kick to the curb all the clutter that I could see piling up in my house. We had gotten quite merry with decking the halls that year, especially because we were celebrating our tour for my first Christmas album. Yet, in the after-­Christmas glow, I began to crave the clean slate of remembering Jesus in the form of a fresh year and a new beginning. So I made plans. Like, hit-­the-­ground-­running kind of plans for the new year:

Word for the year? Check!

Game plan to purge my house of clutter? Check!

Themes laid out for my podcast for the next six months? Check!

I was going to get organized, study, create—­even start this book—­as I thrived my way into the new year!

Insert the narrative of that scene from the movie Father of the Bride Part II where the main character foreshadows how his life is getting ready to go topsy-­turvy: “All those who think they have it made, take one step forward. Not so fast, George Banks.”

Not so fast, Christy Nockels. Only eight days into 2018, I found myself sitting in an ENT’s office while he dropped on me the diagnosis of sudden sensorineural hearing loss. I’d gone in to address what I thought was a possible ear infection, so I didn’t bring my husband to the appointment with me. I remember how the doctor’s mouth moved as he spoke but I was grasping only about every other word, not because of my hearing loss but because I was in disbelief. I did gather that an MRI might be a good idea to rule out the big stuff that could be causing the hearing loss, like a tumor.

I walked out to my car and sat at my steering wheel with my body sweating, my head spinning, and my eyes filling with tears. I called my husband, Nathan, to try to explain the news, and all I could think of was how many questions I didn’t ask the doctor. The MRI, a few days later, produced only more questions as I was told that I’d need to have a neurosurgeon look at a spot on my brain.

Table of Contents

1 His Banner over Me Is Love 3

Part 1 The Calling of the Beloved 15

2 The Farm-Table Epiphany 17

3 The Glorious in the Mundane 34

4 The Already of Our Story 50

5 Those Who Look to Him 67

Part 2 The Community of the Beloved 85

6 There's No Brass Ring 87

7 Complete My Joy 103

8 Amaryllis Prayers 120

Part 3 The Capacity of the Beloved 137

9 Heart like a Honeycomb 139

10 Everything Is Mine in You 157

11 The Power of Small 174

12 Always Remember to Never Forget 190

Acknowledgments 209

Notes 213

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