This promise is one of my favourite passages from the Bible, and one that I find myself returning to a lot lately. But the truth is that for the longest time, I used to interpret it wrongly…

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

(Psalm 37:4)

For years, I thought that this meant that if I delighted myself in God He would give me pretty much whatever I wanted or asked Him for, like some kind of holy Santa Claus or genie in a magic lamp.

So whenever parts of my life didn’t unfold exactly as I expected, or within the timescales that I felt were acceptable, I would find myself feeling angry and let down by God, and quickly questioning my faith.

Why wasn’t I getting my heart’s desires?! Why was God withholding something good from me? Wasn’t I delighting in Him enough? Hadn’t I put in enough fervent hours of prayer? Did I need to do more “spiritual stuff” in order to somehow prove my devotion and twist His arm into blessing me?

The truth is that it has taken me years of wrestling with disappointments to realize that this kind of thinking is totally flawed. God isn’t a spiritual vending machine, and you can’t insert spiritual tokens and then select whatever you want from him with the push of a button. A relationship with God can’t be treated as if it were just another consumer transaction.

It’s no secret that one of the greatest desires of my heart is for another child, yet after 3 long years of seeking God as best I know how through the heartbreak of losses and infertility, I remain empty handed.

To be honest, I feel like I’ve been handed more than my fair share of setbacks and disappointment. And so these days, I have come to understand this verse quite differently, and these days I interpret it more like this:

I think maybe what it really means is that when we delight ourselves in the Lord, we discover that the desires of our heart naturally begin to fall more in line with His own. Our perspective begins to change. Our priorities begin to become his priorities, and we start to discover that simply being in His presence is the greatest gift of all.

In God’s presence I so often find that things begin to be set right again, and all of my anger and bitterness and sadness and unanswered questions, begin to subside. My heart is softened again, I can begin to experience his peace, and I am reminded about what really matters most.

And in the end, after all my fighting and wrestling with God is done about a situation that I don’t like and didn’t choose, I always find myself landing back at this same point; as much as I want another baby, I need His presence more.

I still don’t have all the answers or fully understand how any of this works, (I’m not actually sure we can this side of heaven) but what I do know is that God’s love has to be my starting point, my ending point, and
everything in between.

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