Ahwatukee is an area of Phoenix that backs up to South Mountain. Some jokingly call it the “world’s largest cul-de-sac,” and they aren’t wrong. If you get lost in the depths of Ahwatukee on a street with the word “desert” in the name, you could drive around for hours. Large cul-de-sac aside, it is a beautiful area of Phoenix. Rose and clay-colored homes back up to hillsides and large bushes of fuchsia, coral, and red bougainvillea provide bright pops of color.

We lived in Ahwatukee during our years in Phoenix and it was a good place for us. We left the cold of the Northeast behind us for a few years, trading hot tea in winter months for cold smoothies, and boots for sandals most of the year.

One way of getting to our house was by way of a hill. The top of the hill provided breathtaking views of the valley below. While daytime views were beautiful, it was that time of twilight, when the sun is setting and all the world is magic, that offered beyond this world beauty. It was indescribable. Fiery shades of coral, purple, red, blue, green, and yellow brought colors of an ever-present Phoenix sun going down and making its way to the other side of the world. I would always hope that a car was not behind me while I was driving so that I could take extra minutes to inhale the view and all the feelings it evoked. I longed for that feeling to continue as I drove away, even as I knew it couldn’t, knew that all would grow dim as darkness consumed the fiery beauty.

While longing is a good adjective for what I felt during those moments, it didn’t, and it doesn’t describe the depth of my feeling. It was this week that I discovered a word that gives an explosion to the longing I would feel in those moments. It’s a much-needed word in a world where our own language so often fails us. The word is “sehnsucht” – a German noun loosely translated as longing, desire, yearning or craving. One writer described it as an “inconsolable yearning or wistful longing for something one cannot explain or does not know.” The word is also used to mean thoughts and feelings about life or experiences that are incomplete while what is longed for is an experience that one can hold on to, one that will last forever. This, then, is what I experienced during those moments on the hilltop.

As often happens when I discover a word, I began to see this word everywhere. From articles to books, I found others who wrote about and experienced this reality.

If saudade is one of the perfect words for third culture kids to give voice to their experiences and longings, then sehnsucht is another. Saudade emphasizes the longing for what no longer exists. We experienced something and long for it, even as we know it doesn’t and cannot still exist. The people are gone, and the places have changed. Nostalgia is another word where the Greek words of return and suffering combine to create a word that has the essence of suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. As we come to peace with our saudade and our nostalgia, sehnsucht emerges as a word that brings life to the indescribable longing that we feel within and outside of our passport countries, a yearning for places beyond our current reality, for places we’ve actually never been and that don’t exist on this earth.

Author CS Lewis seems to understand this when he writes “Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.” [The Weight of Glory]

Many might feel sadness that “inconsolable yearning” is at the heart of this word. I do not. I see this as a window to my faith; an understanding that the only thing that will ever console my ultimate longing is eternity. Of all the beautiful sunsets I will ever see or experience, an eternity with the creator of the sunsets is the only thing that can satisfy this yearning.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

CS Lewis in The Weight of Glory

I have decided that far worse than the longing or the sehnsucht would be its absence. Indeed, its absence would be a type of hell, breaking us off from contact with an ever-present God who delights to surprise his children with glimpses of glory, embedding in us a longing that can only be satisfied in an eternity beyond.