Psalm 37, third reflection
“he will give you your heart’s desire” or “he will give you the desires of your heart” (v. 4b)
Referring back to yesterday, the
first part of this verse is “commit your life to the Lord.”
It is true that when we commit
our lives to the Lord, He showers us with blessings. (Mark 10:30 says that we
receive persecutions besides, and all we have to do is consider the lot of the
Christians in the Middle East to see how true that is.) But I would like to
reflect a bit more on this notion that He will give us “the desires of our
hearts.”
Do we even know that those true
desires are? I don’t think we always know for sure, and I know from experience
that it takes a lot of self-scrutiny and silence and meditation and prayer for
us even to get close to the “heart” of things. This side of the grave, we poor
creatures live in an almost constant state of delusion, as if a veil is over our
eyes and we see dimly if at all. Consider your own history: how many times have
you discovered that what you held to be right and true and good for you turns
out to be false in the light of present knowledge and experience.
A very recent example: Earlier
this week I was praying for some particular favor. I didn’t receive what I was
praying for. After discussing it with a couple of friends, I came to realize
that I was deluded in even asking in the first place. “What was I thinking of?”
I ask myself now. I am far better off not having what I asked for. At
the time I asked, I was convinced it would be a good thing. In retrospect, I
can see how I was mistaken—deluded, if you will. In refusing my prayer,
God, in His wonderful way, had my back. He was looking out for what was best
for me. And now I realize that He has given me the true desire of my heart,
which is to live with a measure of peace that the request wouldn’t have given
me—in fact, it risked bring turmoil into my life.
All this, and it was just a
little thing, or so I thought when I asked. Can you relate to this?
The Hebrew word for heart
is not referring to an organ in the chest. It refers to the very inner essence
of a person, the seat of the self—the true self, not the false self that we so
often live out of. And that is why it takes time and patience and grace and
struggle to grasp.
One thing I do know: when we
commit our lives to the Lord, our lives begin to change, to become transformed
into something we never could have imagined before we turned to the Lord. And
what we discover as we live through this process of constant transformation is
that things are what we actually desired all along.
The French mystic Jean-Pierre de
Caussade, in his classic work Self-abandonment
to Divine Providence, says that God doesn’t mind disappointing us. We want
to sail in one direction and he changes the winds to come from the other
direction. But in the end, he brings us “safely to port.” If we had gotten to
where we think we wanted to go, we would have suffered ship-wreck. (By the way,
this is a book that I highly recommend you read, or reread every couple of
years, particularly when things aren’t going the way you thought you wanted.)
God bless you.
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