I’ve been reading several books lately that seem to ask the same kinds of questions. What are you hoping for? What do you long for? What are your desires in life? Big questions with no easy answers for me. And the down side to discovering what I really, really want is that it increases my awareness of not having it. Who wants that?! What tension. What frustration. Wouldn’t it be better for me to squelch those deeper desires and just be happy with what life hands me? Wouldn’t that be a safer place for my heart? And isn’t it just plain and simple a better use of my time? You tell me. If you are aware of any unmet needs or desires in your life, specifically in the area of relationships, does it work to ignore them and just suck it up? It hasn’t worked for me. Instead of reassigning those feelings or frustrations, what ends up happening is that we decrease our capacity to deal with anything else, until those boxed up emotions pop out in the most unexpected and ferocious ways. It takes energy to ignore something. And if you’ve ever caught a glimpse of a larger life – a way of being that is infinitely more satisfying, albeit riskier, than anything you’ve known, do you want to put that away and pretend it never touched you? I don’t.
By its very definition, the word risk implies that we may lose something. It’s a chance of something going wrong. Statistical odds of danger. Possibility of investment loss. Skydivers risk serious injury or even death to feel the exhilarating rush of jumping out of a plane and experiencing the open sky around them. Soldiers in combat risk their lives to help insure freedom and safety for those back home. A chef risks bad reviews and clientele not liking his food when he tries new recipes to push the culinary envelope and establish himself as a leader in the food industry. There are all kinds of risks involved in life, and when we are willing to accept the worst-case scenario to try to attain the best, we assume a calculated risk. It’s why insurance companies and bookies exist – to collect on the upside of risk or capitalize on the downside.
But what am I risking to have a deeper, more satisfying life? Am I playing it so safe that my days are photocopies of one another as I spend my energy protecting myself from life’s worst-case scenarios? Or are my flailing attempts at achieving success so haphazard that my days are merely pauses between adrenaline rushes? Where does true satisfaction lie? Is it in meeting goals? Staying safe? The feeling of being “on the edge”? Being popular? Rich? Beautiful? Accomplished?
I submit that the biblical answer to all of the above is a resounding, “no”. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that hard work and knowledge are “meaningless, a chasing after wind”. The author’s conclusion is as follows:
Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
(Ecclesiastes 12:13)
The Westminster Catechism puts forth this statement as the definition of a satisfying life worth living:
Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
And the Psalms are full of rich and diverse emotions that spill from the authors’ heart onto the pages for us. These and the stories of the Old and New Testaments resonate with us on various levels as the characters from the past navigate their way through the confusion, frustration and joy of life as they lived it. Stories of people pursuing God and striving to live a life that is both within His parameters and full of meaning. Stories just like ours. Stories lived by people who asked themselves hard questions like: What am I hoping for? What do I really long for?
These questions are important because they are meant to lead us to God. God plants the desires in our hearts to point us to Him because He alone can satisfy those longings and He created us to be in intimate relationship with Him. Look at Psalm 37:4…
Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Instead of thinking of it as getting what I want because I learn to love God more, let’s look at it a different way, in light of our questions. God wants us to ask ourselves the questions about our deepest desires so we can recognize that He is the only answer to the question! God can’t be manipulated to give us what we want if we just jump through the right hoops. But He can (and will) transform us and enlighten us so that what we truly desire, deep down in the depths of our spirit is perfectly in line with what He wants for us to have a deep and satisfying life.
So this begs three questions. One, how do I know what I want? And two, how do I go after it? And perhaps most importantly for our purposes, three. What do I do when life turns out differently than my deepest desires?
These are the questions I really need answers to and it's what I spend a lot of heart energy pursuing. More thoughts to come...
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