Each year for vacation, my husband and I go to a beach town called Ogunquit on the coast of Maine. It’s one of our favorite places to visit. We stay at a hotel on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It also sits along a walking path known as the Marginal Way, a mile-or-so trail with big rocks that we can climb on.
On our way to the beach every morning, we walk by the hotel pool—and it’s always full of people. And when I say “full,” I mean it. The pool is very small, and it looks overcrowded when there are just 10 people in it, yet one time I counted more than 25 swimmers. And it is usually filled with the same people day after day.
It makes sense that people want to swim in a pool. After all, it’s usually hot in the summer and a pool is a fun place to cool off. But so is the beach! And the beach is much bigger than a tiny pool.
As I was wondering why the same people would choose to spend their vacation in a tiny pool instead of playing on a giant beach, I thought about my favorite saint, St. Augustine. He spent a lot of time thinking about desire, which means hope or wish. When we desire something, we hope we get it. St. Augustine thought that desire was kind of like a bag that we plan on filling with a lot of things. But the bag doesn’t seem big enough, so what do we do? Well, he says, we stretch it: “By stretching, therefore, you increase the capacity of the bag, and this is how God deals with us.”
Have you ever eaten taffy, the stretchy, colorful candy? Do you know how you can pull it and make it really long? That’s what Augustine thinks we should do with our desires: stretch them and pull them and make them bigger than what they currently are.
Another theologian who thought a lot about desire was C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Augustine, Lewis believed that God wants our desires to be as big as they can be. That’s a different way of saying that God sometimes thinks our desires are too small. Lewis used the illustration of going to the beach. He said humans are like kids who want to “go on making mud pies in a slum because [we] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Imagine your parents come home and find you playing in your muddy backyard. They ask if you would rather go to the beach instead, but you say no. You’re happy playing in the mud and don’t feel like ending your game for the hassle of getting in the car and getting all your beach things together and driving somewhere else.
Now, playing in the mud can certainly be fun, but that’s something you can do whenever you want. The mud is always there. But going to the beach with your family is a special occasion; it’s not something you can do every day. This is Lewis’ point: Wanting to play in the mud isn’t bad. But the question is whether it’s the best thing to want to do at that particular moment.
I think Lewis is right. God wants us to reflect on our desires, to think about not only what we want but why we want it. We might realize that what we thought we wanted isn’t the best thing for us. We might also realize that there are better times to get that thing we want.
A good example of this is when I take my 4-year-old nephew to a store. Like many kids, Bennett usually wants a toy whenever we go anywhere. But sometimes we’re in a grocery store and sometimes we’re in a clothing store, and neither of those places has very good toys. So I have to explain to him that it’s good to want toys, but we have to wait for the right time to get the right toy.
We can think about our wants, or desires, like puzzle pieces. All of them are important, and we need them all if we are ever going to make the right puzzle. But each puzzle piece has a place, and the most important part of doing a puzzle is finding the right place for the right piece. Just like with a puzzle, we have to work on getting our desires in the right order.
Jesus talked about desire, too. He said that while it’s OK to want many things, we should ask God to help us want the right things at the right time. Here’s one example he gives. Imagine you are at church or synagogue. (Remember: Jesus is Jewish, so he didn’t worship God at a Christian church.) Let’s say you brought a gift with you to give to God. Well, what if, just as you’re about to give your gift to God, you remember that you got into a fight with your friend earlier that day?
Jesus says God wants you to go make things right with your friend before you give God your gift. Wanting to worship God and wanting to repair broken relationships are both good desires, but God thinks one is more of a priority than the other.
Jesus also points out that it’s important to have your physical needs met, like having clothes to wear and food to eat. These things cost a lot of money, and it’s OK to want enough money to be able to have these things. But, Jesus says, money is not the mostimportant thing. What’s more important than wanting money is wanting to be in relationship with God, who promises to take care of us.
Jesus then gives us a very good saying about desire: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). Jesus is teaching us that our job as Christians is to order our desires, like a puzzle. It’s OK to want a bunch of different things, but we need to organize our own wants while still making sure that everyone is also getting what they need.
Now, back to the pool. It’s not necessarily bad if we want to swim in a hotel pool instead of going to the beach. But what if we demand to stay in the pool all day long, on each day of our vacation, even if our other family members really want to go to the beach? Kids can’t play in the pool by themselves, so if you get your way, then the other people in your group can’t get their way. Our desires have consequences for other people. Thinking through our desires means thinking about how other people might be affected if we get what we want.
This doesn’t mean we should choose to go to the beach just because our family members want to do it. Maybe we can make a deal with them: We can spend some of our time at the pool and some of it at the beach. Maybe even we can honor their desire first and spend the early part of the day at the beach.
God doesn’t want us to stop wanting what we want. God wants us to want even more. As a psalm puts it, God doesn’t stop giving us good things when our cup if full; God causes it to overflow (Ps. 23:5). Our job as Christians, then, isn’t to stop wanting, but to think about if we are wanting the right things at the right time and in the right way.
Image: Unsplash/Anurag Yadav
Add comment