Psalm 37v4 ~ Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. ..
From the most tender age I have understood this scripture differently. For many, it means that the Creator will grant them their wishes. This understanding is a sure way to affirm that all the many egoistic wanting will be satisfied by the powers of the Creator. I am not sure if it was a teaching by the late Myles Munroe or someone else but I understood this scripture to mean quite the opposite. I understood it to mean that God in wisdom will determine what our desires will be. The desires He grants us may be slightly or very very different to what we would want for ourselves. Left to our own short sightedness we would want convenience and satisfaction and pleasure. All the things that feed the ego. Yet, when those things are granted we find ourselves dissatisfied and frustrated and we want the next thing and the next thing after that.
The desires of the heart are yearnings of a deeper kind and it takes lifetimes to satisfy such longings. These yearnings are almost never satisfied by things, people and events. The nature of these yearnings are dynamic. They change all the time leading us to ever deepening levels as we evolve and our understanding and courage grows. Just as soon as we arrive at some point where we thought we would be complete, we find ourselves realising that there is much more to achieve and believe. This is perhaps why older people often say “the more I learn the less I know”. Our quest to attain knowledge brings us to understand how deceiving knowledge really is. We search in vain for it like traveling to a most attractive oasis only to realise it was a mirage created out of desperation and fear.
The desires of our heart are like a life force inside us and is to our souls what blood is to our bodies. The sacred texts say that the life is in the blood. Perhaps we can say that the life force is in the desires of the heart. These deeper desires propel us through trials and tribulations. They cause us to overcome heartbreak and despair. When all seems lost there is a force that beckons us to rise and take another feeble step and walk again. Even when one feeble step after another still provides no visible sign of promise, we grow stronger in our persistence. Our own intuitive guide leads us to press on to a goal we cannot always explain to ourselves or others.
I find myself navigating a second divorce but overcoming a third relationship. Sound teachings instruct me not to resist the pain and I am experiencing the deep wisdom of that. It’s almost as though the pain has a character of its own and needs to be embraced. In doing so, I can let go of the drama and story and really just honour myself and my experience with a kind of reverence I have not experienced before. It takes all the courage I have and there are days when courage seems to abandon me.
However, when courage is tangible and when it evades, there is a steady beat of the desires of my heart. It does not wax or wane. Like the mountains stand firm and the eagle remains on course in the storm, so is the steady beat of the desires of my heart. The desires of my ego nag and compete frantically for attention and have many tantrums during the course of the day. But the desires of the heart beat with a command and an authority so great I know that they are from the Great Spirit. In all things I choose to give thanks – to delight myself in the Divine Love of the Great Spirit. True to the word, it grants me the desires of my heart – a steady, unrelenting heartbeat which holds a great and magical promise.
Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. ..
Times Between with Michelene 