Desire

"Most of you will by this time have lost a parent, a spouse, even a child. Your hopes for your career have not panned out. Your health has given way. Relationships have turned sour. We all know the dilemma of desire, how awful it feels to open our hearts to joy, only to have grief come in. They go together. We know that. What we don’t know is what to do with it, how to live in this world with desire so deep in us and disappointment lurking behind every corner. After we’ve taken a few Arrows, dare we even desire? Something in me knows that to kill desire is to kill my heart altogether."

I read this in an email this morning. It speaks so clearly to where my heart is lately. Wrestling with God over my heart and the fear of relationships. I feel like I've been throwing a spiritual temper tantrum, because I can't control things. I don't want to get hurt and I don't want to hurt another girl. But I know we can't love without the reality of getting hurt. Love is vulnerable.

Trusting God is a weird thing. In my own life, God's reality has been slowly but surely becoming more personal and real to me. I'm understanding Him more as a person and less of a concept. With that, assenting to facts about Him is shifting to trusting His character and goodness. Relationships are the deepest area of pain in my life, which I'm sure is true for a lot of people. It is really easy to compartmentalize my life and keep the relationship aspect separate from God. It hurts to desire and have that constantly disappointed. And after years of "failed" relationships (several people have pointed out that ALL relationships prior to the person you marry have failed... so they aren't really failing), I start to doubt God's goodness in this area. Or, honestly, my biggest struggle is a lack of something concrete to hope in. It isn't that I don't think God is good, but somehow that His goodness doesn't apply to me in this area. It seems a stretch to me, to trust that God will help me work through these relationship fears and ultimately find love and get married. He never promised that in scripture. So what does it look like to be vulnerable before God, to bring Him my desire and trust that He is good, regardless of if this desire is ever filled? Will He still be good if I stay single for the remainder of my life, never losing the desire to be married? I think so. But that will take a massive shift in perspective... and a lot of grace and strength from God to withstand the on-going disappointment from unmet desire... "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."

But I know that checking out and killing the desire in me is a sure path to despair. Our desires come from God, I think. So it feels like it's a weird waiting, trusting game with Him. But maybe it isn't a game. Maybe He is very intentional and precise and tender with the process. Maybe the timing is crucial to developing us into the people He wants us to be? I'm not sure...