Desire can be a difficult thing to handle well.

For we all have desires. For some, they fuel everything they do. For others, they can lead to despair, disruption, and/or discouragement.

Desires however, as I have grown to understand my own, ultimately lead a believer’s healing heart to Christ.

Clearly, desire can be harmful when we embrace them more as lust fueled gratifications, rather than the motivations of love they truly are.

What do we most desire? If I had been asked that as a teenager I most likely would have said, lots of money.

But why? I didn’t bother at that time to probe any deeper, but if I had, it would have revealed an inner desire for validation, value, and worth. For if we sense we lack these things, or seek them from a worldly stand point, we may naturally assume more money can fulfill those needs – even though it can’t.

I now understand, and am beginning to allow myself to experience the truth that I am valued, I do have profound worth, and my validation is cemented in Christ. All life has value because all life is wonderfully and lovingly created by God. Money doesn’t determine a person’s worth, for in God’s eyes, we are all priceless.

Understanding this truth redirects my answer to the question, what do I desire most. Today, it’s “freedom to live my life well” – to expand on this, it’s the liberation that comes from God’s truth, for His truth sets us free.

The more truth we have, the more wisdom we have to live life well. This wisdom comes from God, truth comes from God, life comes from God, the desires of our heart come from God, and freedom comes from God – all of which heals our hearts and teaches us how to live our one precious and wildly wonderful life abundantly well.

Not that we will be perfect and flawless, but I for one, no longer want to spend my days chasing money, promotion, power, platform, and praise. Although we all like these things, they can quickly get out of perspective, and become primary motivations. This is harmful because they’re all temporary and fading pleasures that can’t satisfy our hearts and souls long term. Only Jesus has the living water that gives us the good life that is eternal and true.

Sadly, sometimes we may try to kill off our desires in an effort to protect ourselves from disappointment and harm. For we all know heartache, loss, and pain. I know I tried this too – for if I thought if I could kill off desire, I could prevent disappoints from taking me down into depression, and defeat.

But this only serves to kill our hearts and souls. For we are made to desire good things. We were made for goodness, love, fellowship, connection, truth. Instead, we see a world filled often times with the opposite – so to hold hope and desire can appear too dangerous.

Instead, I am learning to hold desire and to allow it to grow. To enlarge like an expectant birth – and to be born in God’s perfect timing. A precious gift of eager anticipation, and joyful expectancy. It grows, it fuels dreams, propels hope, and motivates life.

As Christians, we always have something glorious to look forward to and at all times. Desire teaches us this. We have Heaven, we have Hope, we have Help. Even when tragedy strikes and disappointments come, our desires aren’t destroyed. For we have eternity to look forward to. It doesn’t have to all come in the here and now.

Death isn’t to be feared. It isn’t the end. So, in Christ, we get to “die while we’re living, rather than live like we’re dead”.