The Tribe

 Deep desires that are never realized. We all have them. They're painful, frustrating, and cause us to often question the goodness of a God who promised to give us "the desires of our heart." We all have them, but the question is, how do we live with them? In the midst of them, what becomes our focus? The pain? The frustration? The anger? Do we just dream about a life we wished we had while hating the life we do have? John Eldredge in his book, Walking With God, writes, "You can't go through your day continually pining for the life you do not have. You have to live the life you do have." How many of us will do that? How many of us sleepwalk through our lives wishing we were living another?

In response to what Eldredge wrote, I put down in my prayer journal, "There's a great difference between desiring the life we wish we had, and seeking the life we were created for." Hebrews 11 speaks of the heroes of faith, and said of them, "....they were no more than foreigners and nomads here on earth. And obviously people like that are looking for a country they can call their own." They were looking for the country they were created to seek and they knew that country would never be found here. Verse 16 says, "They were looking for a better place. We all have that yearning for a better place. Our problem is that we think we can find that place here. We think "home" is here. The better country, the home we were made for, is only found in one place. In the heart of the Father.

Few of us are willing to be "nomads," following wherever He leads. Those who do enjoy His blessing and bounty in the journey, but the blessing and bounty don't hold us. They don't hold our hearts. He does. I've a wise friend who says He desires to live out his life as Christ did, in the bosom of the Father. For Jesus, that was home, and no earthly place could compare to it or bring the satisfaction that it did. Jesus was a nomad, calling to Himself a tribe of nomads. Have you and I ever really become a part of that tribe? 

Does this mean that we're to deny our longings and desires? Are we to resign ourselves to His never meeting them at all? No. He's calling us to live in Him, fully in Him in the midst of even our deepest and purest desires. Only as we remain in Him can we guard against a desire becoming a "need," a "must have" in order for us to be content. When that happens, the result will always be the destruction of our peace, joy, and satisfaction in Him. We'll always feel we're missing something, being deprived of something. Something we feel we have a right to, that we're entitled to. That's where resentment creeps in. We suspect He is holding back, holding out on us. We question His goodness and His love. The object of unrealized desire becomes our own "better country," our idol, and we no longer live in and for Him, but in pursuit of the desire that has become our heart's treasure.

I have spent too many years looking for the better country here, thinking it can be found in relationships, ministry success, and a host of other "good things." Along the way He met so many of my desires, but it was in the unmet ones that I lost my peace, joy, and fulfillment in Him. I allowed them to go from being desires to being things I had to have.....or else. Aware of it or not, I slipped into believing that if I didn't have them, I didn't really have life. I was wasting the life I had in my yearning for a life I didn't have. Where might you be doing the same?

Victory for me came when I surrendered the desires and longings, the life I wanted to have, to Him. In this I found peace.....and joy, fulfillment, and purpose in the life I did have in Him. My eyes and heart were opened to treasures and wonder I'd been blind to. I not only "saw" the beauty in my life as it was, I began to see the life He had created me for and was always before me, calling me onward, calling me home. Home to the better country of His heart and Kingdom.....That same call is before you right now. Can you hear it? Can you begin to see the borderlands of that country? Press on, and.....welcome to the tribe!

Blessings,
Pastor O