Raindrops in the Ocean

Central Coast from the northbound train

Psalm 37:4

Pismo Beach: Pomroy

I was on the train to LA, praying through a major decision.  I returned to the familiar passage in Psalm 37:4:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

So often we take the phrase “He will give you” to mean “He will fulfill,” but it is much more than that.

Many years ago, I discovered that this phrase also means “He will put His desires into your heart.”  The desire itself is a gift.  Desire is very important to God, and as we allow ourselves to be changed by Him, He changes our desire.  It is one of the ways in which He leads us.

God leads through desire.

This is an unsettling concept to many of my friends.  After all, it is our desire that can lead us astray.  I went back to the original Hebrew recently, to dig in deeper.  That phrase “and He will give you” means so many things! Fulfill…direct…restore…

Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will restore the desires of your heart.

Dear God, yes!  Yes please!  All of us…our desires are sometimes amiss, sometimes tarnished, sometimes broken.  If I am going to live from a full heart, I need my broken or tarnished desires to be restored.

How?  How do I get this?  I want to want what God wants.

Delight myself in the Lord…according to my Strong’s Concordance app, this is a primitive root that means “to be soft or pliable.”

I feel like that should be a mic drop.  I mean…in my heart, that was a mic drop.   More often than my desire leading me astray, it is my strength of will.  Once I decide a thing, I see it through.  So I sat before God with this decision before me.  And I decided to be flexible.  I decided to allow God to change my plans.

I want to want what God wants.