I have always felt my desires intensely. Growing up I knew instantly what I wanted to do or eat or watch or listen to. And I had a very hard time enjoying or entering anything that wasn’t what I wanted. No one ever called me, “easy going”. Ever. But they did call me passionate and I liked that. I felt passionate was the best way, most exciting way, to live. People who weren’t passionate were boring. I found boring intolerable.
During my college years I began to see my passion as a burden and I wanted less of it. I clearly understood that if I didn’t want things so intensely it wouldn’t hurt so much, ache so much, when I didn’t get what I wanted. But I wasn’t able to quiet or tame them. I only knew how to feed my desires and thus settle them down for a while.
Change began when I read through the book of Jeremiah. My Ryrie Bible tells me Jeremiah was “often called the weeping prophet” (Jer 9:1, 13:17) and this made sense to me since most of Jeremiah’s writings are words of condemnation for the nation of Israel. It is bad news over and over and I found it depressing to read, until I began to notice something about God. Despite the complete and thorough unfaithfulness of God’s chosen people, He still wanted them. Though they left Him for pitiful idols, He wanted them back. He wanted them intensely and was not too proud to plead for their return (Jer 3:12-14, 19, 22). There was one phrase in particular that came up repeatedly: “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” (Jer 24:7, 30:22, 31:33). In this phrase I began to hear the depth and the passion of God’s desire’s for relationship with a people of His own. And with this vision of God’s passionate heart I heard an affirmation for my own passionate heart. I saw that He had put His heart in mine and that this was one way I was made in His image. This realization was such a balm to my soul for I had come to loath my own desires and the disappointments they brought me.
A second realization was necessary for real change to happen in me and Jeremiah’s words, once again, opened my eyes to what I had face:
“My people have committed two sins;
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water”
Jer 2:13
Jeremiah helped me understand in great detail where my heart and mind had veered away from God. And I began to see that the things my desires were aimed at were not filling up my heart and that perhaps I did not know, after all, what I wanted.