Answer me, Lord! Answer me! Then these people will know that you, Lord, are God and that you are winning back their hearts. So a fire from the Lord fell down and consumed the burnt offering, wood, stones, and dirt. The fire even dried up the water that was in the trench.
1 Kings 18:37
I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
John 17:22
Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 37:4
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life
Proverbs 13:12
Dear One,
You have asked me to take away these desires and longings. That if these are never going to be fulfilled or brought to fruition, to just take them away to alleviate the ache. You trust that I will give you the desires of your heart and so you have kept coming to Me, asking me to either mould these longings into the shape of the future that I have for you, or to simply fulfill them, but to not leave this gap between your desires and the reality of your circumstance. Because a hope deferred can make a heart grow sick.
You were created to love. I made you to be soft, loving and tender. I know you often feel that you have a heart too full and swollen to be kept inside your chest; that it spills and expands into expression, cannot be held in. That it pours over with words and touch, sees the gaps, feels the need, reaches across to bridge the divide; because you know, you know that no one was created to be alone, to stand alone. That loneliness can be the difference between a person standing and falling. I also know that you question how you are, whether you are too much, too full-on, because you don’t often see yourself reflected back. You don’t often see the full measure around you; balance and steadiness are more common, reserve and stability more wanted, a reasonable investment for a reasonable return. High safety, low risk.
But I created you to love. Lavishly and abundantly, to lay down weapons of offence and defence and to move in the fullness of who I created you to be; to the heartbeat and source of Love. To the rhythm of Me.
I have not removed your longings and desires, my love. And I will not reduce their intensity and strength. Because I do not want to water you down or lessen your capacity to love with potency and power. To stem the flow of this, to limit the move of this feels like jarring, like the stiffening of water into robotic machine. It steals the air from you, strangles your breath. Why would I lessen who I created you to be? So just breathe and love, dear one, in all the ways that it moves and grows and blooms and spills.
Instead, what I want you to do is to redirect your ache and longing, to shift the focus and aim and throw it full force, full throttle on Me. Because you know how to surrender, to devote, to pour yourself out, to kneel and yield and give yourself, holding nothing back. But turned in the wrong place, this becomes worship of a lesser thing, something that cannot respond or hold the fullness of you; something that becomes crushed under the weight of your gaze and adoration.
But with Me, it is full-fledged and beautiful. With Me, when you lay yourself down on the altar of love, You find Me already there. You find me stretched out for you, blood and water, across the wooden cruciform of an altar where I take the nails, I take the pain, I take the separation and divide for the love of you. When you kneel and pour the oil of your adoration full measure on Me, I am kneeling already; bathing your feet where they are soiled, bruised and sore; loving the unloveliest parts of you because there is nothing about you that I will not take in, not bring close to be loved back to beauty once again.
When you meet me at the altar, when your surrender meets my sacrifice, the fire cannot help but fall. It cannot help but come and ignite the union between you and I, because sacrifice always brings fire and you set me ablaze with your love. Your yielding allows My power and full measure to flow and to burn in the way it was always intended for us; allowing a wild, unstoppable love to be created like the world has never seen. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can ever give Me that I will not return back to you pressed down, shaken together and running over. My love, you are safe with Me. So safe with Me.
Your desire, your longing, your passion, your aching can all be given to Me; it was made for Me. It finds its flourishing and fulfillment in Me. I do not want you to be less. I want you to be all that I made you, nothing limited, nothing distorted, nothing capped, nothing culled. Just fully ablaze, set alight, brought to life with Me. You are Mine.