Thoughts on the Journey of Desire (Part 01)

Lately, I’ve been reading The Journey of Desire by John Eldredge and as I’ve progressed through the book, I think the process that he is describing is happening to me. I think I’m starting to get it. Through all the days, dare I say years, of depression and struggle, I believe I have gotten it straight: We need life for our hearts, yet it’s just not possible, not yet anyway.

Isn’t that so disappointing? To be honest, when I first picked up the book I thought it was going to show me how to find the fullness of life that Christ talked about in John 10:10, a life that is, as the book described in its subtitle, “the life we’ve only dreamed of.” I had long left behind the fundamentalist notion of burying my hurt’s desire in the interest of “holiness.” And, obviously, I knew that seeking to indulge sinful desires was a dead end. I thought to myself, “My drivenness to secure the right ministry, marry the girl of my dreams, make enough money, and see my desires met is to live according to desire the way God intended us to.” After all, desire is at the core of who we are. Life is just beginning and I felt that I had just boarded a luxury cruise liner and was waiting for the festivities to begin. I was certain that Eldredge was going to show me how God wanted to bring to pass the life I wanted so desperately. And he did, except just not the way I thought.

His basic three points are (1) We need life, (2) we can’t have life now, and (3) someday we will have the life we desire. As I read, I thought, “You have to be kidding me.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we don’t have tastes of life here and now, or that we aren’t growing into the experience of life as God brings our hearts back from the dead. It’s just that for all the dreams and idealism of youth, for all the well-laid plans, there is the sad reality that I have encountered many times already in my young life – no matter how hard we try, it just never seems to work out quite the way we expected. The perfect girlfriend decides they never really loved you. The job you thought you had in the bag, slips through your grasp, or, better yet, when it does seem to work out, there are always problems and the original high seems to always give way to the doldrums of the daily grind. The more he pointed this out, the more I got the feeling that the cruise liner I had boarded was the Titanic. Instead of thinking that my drive in life to go after these things was borne purely out of a desire to find life in all its fullness, I have been left with the sobering reality that in many ways it is one gigantic defense mechanism. These pursuits are my personal endeavors to make the pain of disappointment and the reality of life in the here and now go away. It’s my frantic attempt to steer clear of the unavoidable ‘iceberg of truth’ that derails my neurotic efforts to find the life I long for in a fallen world. That life, life in all it’s fullness – which is, if we’re honest, what we’re all trying to arrange for – just isn’t going to happen. It’s over. Give up. Fugheddaboudit.

Depressing? Not really. In fact, I discovered a strange paradox– in giving up trying to create this perfect life, I have found myself more at peace. It’s almost as if giving up on making this life “work” frees me to long for and look forward to the one that will. Then again, I think I heard that somewhere before (Matthew 16:25). You see, it’s not that all the things I was going after were sinful. They were good things! Nor does it mean I shouldn’t still seek them. It’s just that I was living my life in denial. I didn’t want to accept reality. The reality that no matter what I do, I’m not going to be able to make it happen, at least not yet. And that word “yet”, I learned, just three letters long, makes all the difference in the world. In letting go and accepting that life in its fullness is not an option in the here and now, I have found great peace in what the Bible calls hope. Hope, Biblically, is the certainty of a future with God and each other that will be everything we’ve been longing for since we lost Eden. It’s what enabled the saints of the first few centuries to endure horrific persecution and torture. There is just something about knowing that your heart’s deepest longings will one day be met. That’s what the Christian life is supposed to be about: beginning to grow into the life that we will experience in its fullness when we “see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

So, should we bother to desire now? By all means. That’s what Eldredge wanted to get across. We should enter more deeply into our desire, with the expectation that our desires will all be fulfilled – eventually. This is how we find true contentment in a life of ups and down, good and bad, and all the rest. And as we find contentment in the promise of hope, we will begin to delight ourselves in the Lord in a way we never have. We will find that He truly is our source of life. When that happens, ironically, God will see it safe to bring us “the desires of [our] heart,” knowing that we will no longer use them as worthless idols like we did before. We will be able to enjoy His blessings as they were intended to be enjoyed.

I guess that brings us to a moment of decision. Are you ready to stop trying to arrange things so that you can find life to the full now? Will you be wise enough to stop deluding yourself into thinking you can do it? I can guarantee you that if you don’t, you will be disappointed. But on the flip side, I can, on the basis of Scripture, guarantee, in some weird way that only God can pull off, that the life you think you are missing out on by letting it all go, will be the very thing you find in the process.

Tom <><