Desire (Revisited)

Desire and reason don’t mix so well. Desire, fully embodied, so easily overpowers reason. This must be why God is constantly remaking our desires. So that when HE does fulfill them, we see them in light of what we truly desire—Him.
Why is it so hard to see this?
Nothing has meaning unless God is in it.
It is so much easier to believe that a person, an object, a job, a calling, a feeling is what will give us fulfillment. But that isn’t true. Those are things we project our desire for Him onto. They only bless us in the context of our desire being met in Him.
Sometimes I think it would be easier not to desire anything at all. That way I wouldn’t feel the ache for what I don’t have, the disappointment of unmet expectations, or the pain of loss. But I was made to desire—no matter how much for a time I might be successful at suppressing it. So I am left to the painful process of always submitting my desires to Him—giving Him permission to remake them, to ask me to wait, to leave them unfulfilled or to fulfill them in accordance with His plan of blessing. It is a hard lesson, but it is the lesson of freedom.
Freedom from being controlled by my desires instead of being blessed by my Maker through them. If only all I wanted for me was You, God…
Ironically, we can become so attached or drawn to God’s love in others that when we experience it in them we are drawn to them selfishly—to get our own needs met. But when it no longer manifests itself in a way in which it gives us what we are looking for, we discard the person it came from. We forget to give of God’s love within us. We neglect being conduits of it and rather than offer back a gift in kind, we move on to the next well we think we can draw it from. We must instead go back to the river of life; the river of love that will never run dry. It is only when we go there first that our souls are healthy enough to drink in God’s love from others without consuming them. He is our water from the rock and our manna for every day. He is the only one whose love is unconditional, everlasting, perfectly safe, worthy of our trust, completely gracious, patient, kind, longsuffering, protecting, trusting, hoping.
God, Your love is not some loose energy floating around to be grabbed without form. Your love is part of Your being, Your person. It manifests itself beautifully and uniquely where You place it. Your love manifests itself in me and through me in a unique way for a unique purpose. Always with purpose, intentionality, and meaning.
You cannot separate my love from my being. It is a part of me. And when God loves through me, you can’t separate His love from me. It is woven into my soul. God plants it, births it, grows it, shapes it, and uses it for His purposes.
Jesus was full of the love of God. God’s love took up residence in Him with all His physical, emotional, intellectual being. His energy is never separate from His essence. We cannot separate the love of God from where He places it. Because where it flows from gives it meaning and shape and form. We must recognize the presence of the manifestation of His love as the essence of God Himself. We enjoy the blessing of it, but never see it as disconnected from its source.
May we receive love from Him and may it flow through us to all who surround us.
God, You want our whole hearts. And you do whatever it takes to pull us back to You when we wander off. You do whatever it takes to remove the apathy we don’t even recognize. You bring us to a place where we feel the fullness of our hearts desire and then You turn our hearts toward You.
How often we fail to recognize our lack of ability to desire You. Yet you awaken our desires by drawing us to You. You are alive in creation, in Your Word, in Your works, in Your people. But often those tangibles so easily become the draw for us—we are blind to the truth that what drew us to those precious gifts was Your presence in them, You were pulling us to You through them.
So when the gift is not there anymore, or Your draw within it fades because we have confused it with the object of our true desire, we search vainly for another gift that was like it to fill the void that it left. Or we long for what we had as if that alone can fill the void. We are addicted to You, but we don’t recognize it when it takes a different form.
How do we want something, how do we desire, with all the fullness of our being, and not allow the unmet desire pull us from You, God?

“Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false. He will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God his Savior. Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek your face, O God of Jacob.”
Psalm 24:3,4,5

(republished for a friend)

Photo "desire enlightened" by bgrace