Do you remember as a child wanting something so bad that it brought you to tears? ..Maybe a toy or a designer shirt like all the cool kids had? Even as a wordless baby, we knew how to communicate to our parents that we wanted something..that we were hungry or thirsty or wanted a specific chew toy..or that we just wanted to be held. We weren't able to say I love you or understand the concept of family, but we knew want.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing, even though we Christians tend to criticize selfish tendencies. The difference lies in what it is we desire. I'm not saying it's wrong to want ice-cream - in that case, I'd be the world's worst sinner. What is heartbreaking, however, is so many of us don't understand that we were created with this innate desire-desire from birth-to know Jesus, to experience Him, to live in relationship with a God that is so much bigger than little us. He is the truest form of the love that we so desperately yearn for as teenagers and adults. He is the truest form of the beauty we are drawn to in other people and want for ourselves. Jesus is the most fulfilling, giving, satisfying person place or thing, but so many of us don't know that He created us with want not so that we can satisfy our flesh, but so that we can want Him.
In Psalm 63 David is stranded in the wilderness, the desert of Judah without family, yet he doesn't cry out to satisfy his physical needs. Verse 1 in the NIV translation says, "my whole body longs for You." And verse 3, "Your love is greater than life." Here we see David understanding that a well of water in the desert won't satisfy his thirst..family and friends in a desolate land won't ease his loneliness..No, it is God that he desires with every inch of his being.
..And that is something so beautiful to me. As a person who craves intimacy and attention, it is so humbling to realize that I was created with those desires so that I can wake up in the morning and want to know God more that day..so that I can desire to be in the one relationship that will never fail me at some point in life..I want, not as a result of the media telling me I should have more, but because I was created to want Jesus, and to always want Him more, know Him more intimately, understand his teaching more and more and more and more.
It's not bad to want more..so long as we know the reason we were made to want.
