What I Desire

I don’t often include a disclaimer, but this time the disclaimer comes first: in the following commentary, I am not passing judgment on what my correspondent did or said, because a) I know very little about that, and b) it is not my business. However, what my own mind and heart did with that information is very much my business, and that is what my commentary is about.

This is what happened: I received an email from a woman who had chosen to remain single. She didn’t specify if she had ever particularly desired to be married, nor did she specify if she was strongly attracted to the man in question. She merely indicated that he was an eligible man, and she chose to remain single, or, to bring it closer to her phraseology, to have only the Lord as her husband. Perhaps her financial situation would have made marriage tempting, but all in all, that is the sum of what I know about it.

But what our minds can do with such stuff!!!

Almost immediately I felt this little thing of yes, it would be more spiritual to have only the Lord as your husband. Now, come on, doesn’t that sound more spiritual to you? To be totally dependant on the Lord, to eschew the sensual pleasures of marriage … yep, sounds spiritual to me! As my mind attempted to dwell on that, however, I remembered something that immediately caused me a little problem. I have, in the past, asked the Lord, very sincerely and innumerable times, to make me satisfied with "only You." Sounds good, doesn’t it? The problem is that my requests didn’t have a right motive. They were based in a squelching of my true desire (for a great marriage) and in fear that the Lord couldn’t or wouldn’t give me what I truly desired. There was also a self-serving aspect of knowing that it is less painful to want what I already have, rather than to want something I don’t have. I don’t consider those to be particularly spiritual motivations for a very spiritual-sounding prayer.

On the other hand, I think that anyone who is honest and has been married beyond the honeymoon phase would agree that it takes a total reliance on the Lord to have a successful marriage! Hormones come and hormones go, seemingly always at the wrong time, from what I’ve heard, and if you aren’t doing the marriage thing "in Christ," you haven’t got a chance of doing the marriage thing with any notable success or joy.

So as sanity returned, I realized, once again, that we can’t judge ourselves or our actions or our desires by someone else. I want what I want, period. It is really that simple. It is not a question, most of the time, of how correct my desire is. The only question is what I will do with my desire.

Do I try to kill it?

Try to meet it?

Or give it to God?

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