It was an April warm on a park bench and she sat kind next to me holding my baby boy while she listened to the words I was giving her in stammers, words that hardly knew how to come. Because sometimes you wonder how you can feel so empty over the person you are inside, over the person you still have no idea how to be.
And while you were born with your own innate desires and strengths and weaknesses and quirks and dreams and struggles that all make you who you are, there isn’t anyone who can teach you how to be you, because no one has ever had the same bundle of things inside them that make you the person God made you to be.
Sometimes it’s just hard to be you. Sometimes you have a restless ache to know if you can tell another soul who the real you is, and if they will stay beside you still, if they still will call you friend. And sometimes you just have to go to someone who is farther down the road you want to be on and ask them to hear the story of you and beg them to tell you if there’s something terribly wrong with the person you think you are. Because how in this great big world do you find out how to be the real person you are on the inside when right can look wrong and up can look down and the world keeps spinning round you reminding you what you’re not. Please keep reminding me that I’m not too broken for grace, not too broken to stay in this race, and it’s all gonna be okay.
Sometimes you look for answers and what you get is not so much answers as a soul that will sit with you where you are and accept your story as it is, relating with you, trusting with you that God will keep walking you forward from right there where you are. And maybe by doing this they help you come to terms with your own story. And maybe right there is where you find what you needed.
I want to find the kingdom of God in step by step notes. But Jesus never described it that way. When Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven, he told people about the kingdom in stories, and every single time Jesus used a story to describe His kingdom, the story was always completely different than the one He used before. (See Matthew chapter 13)
And Jesus is always telling His good news in stories.
I ask Jesus my questions and it can feel like He’s not answering at all. But the truth is that He is always using my heart to tell me a story – even when I’m not listening. Or even when I try to say the story is all wrong.
Because the Word says that He creates people and orchestrates their lives “that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” (Acts 17:27, also see verse 26) He created us with a heart to feel this life, created us so we can “feel our way toward Him.” Our feelings are real and they are valid and they are made to lead us to the heart of God. And our feelings are always listening to something. And He pleads with us to guard this heart that holds these feelings. (Prov. 4:23) This heart that was made to receive those feelings and to do with those feelings what the feelings were made for.
We ask Him for answers and when He says be still, maybe He asks us to listen with our hearts… to move toward Him with each and every one of the feelings this heart holds no matter how messy it feels.
He’s telling us a story…
I look at the desires in my heart and sometimes all I can see is something that looks like a curse. My heart’s desires can also feel like my life’s biggest struggle. It can make me feel like there is something deeply wrong with me. Sometimes I don’t see how the things in my heart could ever lead me closer to God when the things I want can sometimes feel so far from His goodness. It’s so easy to want to wish it all away, to wish away my own longings and desires.
When I look honestly at the things I want, it can make me feel crazy and dirty. And what He says confounds my understanding. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37) Why would God ever give me what I want when what I seem to want is not consistent with who God is? And doesn’t Jesus like to confound us? Almost like it’s one of His favorite gifts to give us. And maybe it really is a gift to receive the feeling of not understanding. Maybe it’s always a gift to feel like a child again. To trust what you’re told like Santa Claus and believe what you’re Papa says.
This verse does not make sense to me. But it makes me feel. And maybe sometimes when God speaks, He talks to the heart more than the head.
Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart…
God reaches into what I desire.
He reminds me what those desires feel like.
He speaks to my longing to find it all fulfilled.
He gives my heart one thing to do.
And He gives me a very deep promise.
And maybe He even bids us to ask ourselves what our hearts really do desire…
My own heart’s desire longs for a way to explore and fully experience and express my every feeling until I find the truest beauty in it. It longs to escape all the counterfeit feelings I have when I’m walking away from a conversation and I feel like we haven’t said all the meaningful things there are to say. My heart craves secrets to tell, meaning to expose. My heart longs to be known and found out. And nothing can make my heart ache more than when it feels hidden things that it can’t figure out how to get past, than when it can’t figure out how to be honest with someone as much as it wants to. Nothing hurts more than being in a room full of people laughing and feeling like it’s all a joke because there’s so much of our hearts we haven’t shared with each other and how can we laugh when we still haven’t figured out how to say all the beautiful things. Sometimes my heart will do anything in the world to try to escape the ache of it to the point of what feels insane.
And sometimes I look at these desires inside me and feel like I’m a person who is flawed to my core, like a person who overwhelms the people in my life.
Yet, God’s purposes are good and He has more of the story to tell. God allows every person their own unique desires and there is such a curious beauty in this. Just like He does for every child in His family, God is always telling a story with these longings.
God is telling stories with the desires of our hearts. And He gives it to us to delight in Him.
And here’s to your heart whatever it desires. God is using the desires of your heart to tell a story. Because here’s what matters… While it is true that the desires of our hearts may expose our hardest weakness and they can even follow a path of sin and self-destruction if we allow them too, what we have to remember is that the desires of our hearts themselves are a gift through which God allows us to participate in what He is already doing.
Your desires are good. And there are people who can sit with them and it will be okay. God’s got you and He’s big enough for your desires no matter the story.
And there is no feeling you can experience that you cannot delight in God with.
We may have hearts full of questions but Jesus loves to give us answers sometimes simply by continuing to unfold the story in His own way. He’ll tell one story with my heart. He’ll tell another story with yours. Jesus never tells the same story twice.
Jesus gave His heart away so that He could tell a story with yours. And he is telling a story in you that He has never told before.
The story he writes with your heart will look so very different from everyone else’s story. There will be people who don’t understand. Jesus has never been in the business of telling stories that are easy to understand. But just like a poem, sometimes even without really understanding its words in the head, it’s the emotion and the beauty of the story that speaks life.
So if you are a story Jesus is telling, if you are a poem Jesus is writing, you can find rest in delighting in Him as He writes it and even if no one understands you, there will still be a soul somewhere who feels the beauty of it. And it will be a story that makes them feel something beautiful, a story they haven’t heard before. And it will help them see Jesus in a way they haven’t seen Him yet. Because Jesus picked this story to tell with your heart and yours alone and He understands it all in the most complete way. He will give it all purpose and that is something you can trust more than anything you feel.
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
The blind man wanted to see. And when they saw his struggle the disciples asked Jesus what was wrong with the man that he had this need. “Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” (John 9:3) The blind man did not have his struggle because there was something wrong with who he was. Jesus made that clear.
And it just might be that the biggest struggle you face, the crazy desires you have, that make you feel so entirely different from everyone else, might just be in your life, not because anything is wrong with you at all but simply because this is the framework Jesus wanted to use to show the beauty of the Gospel in a way He’s never done it before.
If you are His poem, you can rest into the story. Listen to the beauty with everything in your heart and let it move you to the heart of it’s Author.
And move you with His heart.
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