July 1, 2022

The Almost Daily will be on Summer Vacation until August 8th. But fear not! You will receive a devotional each Monday through Friday from the excellent Mockingbird Devotional entitled Daily Grace. Enjoy! - Paul Walker

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)

We’re built for desire. Setting aside the more prurient desires that would make a person blush to read aloud to their grandparents (or grandchildren), our online carts overflow with desires. We keep wishlists of books we want to read, recipes we want to try, and movies we can’t wait to watch. Advertisers seem to know this, targeting our desire for just the right pair of shoes or the perfect outdoor furniture. We’ve barely begun to vocalize a desire before our devices have already found four attractively photographed versions of it to delight our eyes. We know desires, and so does the marketing department.

The desires of our heart, though—they haven’t developed an app for that yet. We ourselves might not know those deep desires, even if we’ve spent some serious time thinking and praying about them. But we are promised that if we take delight in the Lord, he will give them to us. We may have even received our heart’s desires before, but because they didn’t arrive on our doorstep delivered by FedEx, we might not have recognized them as such.

The friendship that came into our lives when we most needed it. The out-of-season hymn that our child hums on the stairs when he had no way to know that’s just what we needed to hear. The niece that brings your sister back into your regular rotation of phone calls. The windfalls of grace and mercy that we didn’t know we needed until we received them.

Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. With a small adjustment of our perspective, we might be able to see the fruits of those desires where we hadn’t been looking.

[Carrie Willard, Daily Grace - Mockingbird Devotional Vol. 2]