The Desires of Your Heart
Whether you have been married for a few months or several decades, I know you have desires in your heart that your husband can’t meet. This is one of the shocking truths you learn about marriage: no one can fulfill all your desires. Except God.
I came into my marriage as a needy mess. Since I had lived with loneliness for a long time in my childhood, I naively expected my husband to serve as the human cure for my companionship desire. Only two weeks after our wedding, my sky-high expectations were dashed. Loneliness came rushing back in, and in some ways, it felt more painful because I was married.
It took years for God to teach me that my husband could not fulfill all my needs. I spent five years in Christian counseling, which helped strip away my codependency and passivity. These were among my needy attempts to have my husband fulfill my needs, and didn’t work. In fact, they only made things worse.
My counselor helped me see that I placed too much value on relationships. He gently steered me toward looking to God first and foremost for the fulfillment of my desires. With my counselor’s guidance, I started feeling stronger, and less dependent. More assertive, and less needy.
While I was walking through this healing journey, I received a piece of wall art as a Christmas present. This wall art has a pretty picture with Psalm 37:4 ESV on it. Every time I pass by it, I meditate on this truth:
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
God wants this verse to sink deep into your heart and do its healing work.
A helpful exercise that we can do is to list out the desires we have. Every single one of them. The desires being met in your marriage and the ones that never seemed to get met. This listing can be painful, but take the time to do it.
After I listed out my desires, through praying about these, God told me that He is the only one able to fulfill all of them to perfection. With God’s help, He helped me let go of unfair expectations I had for my husband to meet those desires, and taught me how to delight myself in His presence first, and then my desires would be fulfilled to overflowing.
Friend, when you lay the desires of your heart before God, He will breathe new life into your marriage. He will set you free from the clinging attempts you make for your husband to fulfill those desires. God will help you see that your husband has limitations, but God has no limitations. As you seek God first, you will set your husband free. You will even be able to love your husband better out of the overflow of your heart.
God promises to give himself in abundance. He will meet your needs for love, companionship and affirmation along with all your other desires. Go to him with an open heart. Lay out your desires before him, and you’ll experience sweet closeness with God and greater blessings in your marriage.
Wife Step: Go ahead. Sit down, and write out your desires, and then pray over those, asking God to meet them.
Sarah Geringer writes about Finding Peace in God’s Word at sarahgeringer.com and is the author of three self-published books. Her book on Christian meditation will be published by Leafwood in late 2019. When she’s not reading or writing, Sarah enjoys painting, baking, gardening and playing the flute. She lives in her beloved home state of Missouri with her husband and three children, right in the heart of prime viewing for the Great Eclipses of 2017 and 2024.
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