The truth in desires

One day, about half way through my senior year of high school, my dad and I were Waffle House having lunch. Waffle House was our place. He said, “You know, this summer will be your last summer before you go off to college. Have you thought about doing anything special?”

“Not really,” I reply. “I guess I’ll just lifeguard again, save up some money to buy a car?”

“Well, if you could do anything what would you do?”

I laughed. Anything didn’t really seem to be on the table.

“No, really, think about it…don’t worry about money or it being ‘realistic’ or anything. Just blue skying… What would you do if you could do anything in the whole world?”

I thought about thinking about it and decided to play along.

“Well, if I could do anything… Hmm… I know! I go live with a tribe in a jungle somewhere.”

The answer surprised both of us. I mean, I’d always loved our stacks of National Geographic’s but this was pretty out of the blue.

“Ok,” he laughed, “Why? What would you want to do there?”

“I’d just want to live there. No agenda. No big group missions trip to build a clinic…” I’d already been on several missions trips by that point and while they were good in many ways, I knew I’d want something different for this dream situation. “And not for like a week or two, but for a long time. I’d just want to be there and see what it’s like to live there.”

“Ok… so… like, a jungle in Africa? Some island? The Amazon?”

“The Amazon,” I replied, like I’d been asked to pick between door number one, door number two, or door number three.

He kind of laughed and said, “Well, I actually happen to know someone who grew up with a tribe in the Amazon. His name is Paul Johnson. We talk every once in a while. Technically I’m on a board for one of his projects. I can call him when we get home and see if he knows of any way to get you there, but honestly, I don’t think anybody takes young individuals to live with tribes in the Amazon for long periods of time to not do anything…even for insurance reasons!” We laughed and honestly, I forgot about it.

When we got home, we walked in the door and the phone was ringing. (This is pre-cell-phone era—I’m talking about the phone on our kitchen counter.) Somebody in the house picks it up and says it’s for dad. That’s how it was done back then. Dad answers the phone, says hello, and starts hitting my arm as I’m beginning to walk away. “Well, hello, Paul Johnson!” He says the name deliberately, grinning and pointing excitedly at the phone. “You’re not going to believe this but my daughter and I were just talking about you at lunch! What’s going on?”

“Well…” Paul starts to explain, “This might be crazy…but I’ve just been thinking lately about what a gift it was for me to grow up out with this tribe the way I did and I…I just…I want to take a few young people—it can’t be a big group—but a few young people out with me and my family this summer to live with the tribe. Just live there. No agenda. Not to build anything. Just…let it shape them. It was so formative for me. Now, I don’t know how to make this work—even for insurance reasons! I guess I’ll have to take young adults, but…I thought of you for some reason. I know you’ve taken lots of people on missions trips. Do you have thoughts on this? Is it too crazy?”

Dad just started laughing. “Ha! Well, I know one person who wants to go! Would you be open to taking a 17 year old?”

I got to go.

I know. It’s hard to believe. But it happened!

And it was a formative time for me. I spent the whole summer between high school and college living with Paul, his family, two 20-somethings from Canada, and a tiny tribe of about 90 people in Bolivia. So many aspects of that summer and those people and that place shaped me. But one thing I’ll share for now came from Paul himself.

The first morning we were there, after breakfast, Paul sat us down and kind of gave us the instructions. It was a short talk. He basically said: What you do with your time here is between you and God. I have no expectations and no judgements. Heck, if I come in here and you’re just sleeping, I’m going to go, Huh, they must need extra rest. Ok. No one’s going to tell you what to do out here. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, just…do what you feel called to do. So, all I ask, is that each morning, heck, every time you notice you don’t know what to do, just ask God: What do you want me to do now?

Nearly every minute of that summer was fertile ground for that teaching. Wandering around in a nearly pre-historic tribe in the Amazon where you don’t know the language, the customs, or even how to survive has a way of keeping fresh that feeling of, What am I supposed to do now? Not a lot of living on autopilot happening.

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I share that story because it was such an over the top, nearly comical way I began to get some real practice and experience with learning how to honor, trust, and follow my desires. Esther Perel says desire is owning your wanting. (Go read/watch/listen to anything from her, it’ll be worth the time.)

Now, I get it, especially for women, this is not what we are usually taught.

So much of Christianity, other religions, and even cultural moralism focus on giving up one’s own desires and living a life of self-sacrifice. As Glennon Doyle sums it up in Untamed, “The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.” We’ve been told plenty that we shouldn’t have desires and that if/when we do, we should sacrifice them. Mothers especially.

But this doesn’t make sense to me. In Genesis, it says that when God created us he said, “Very good.” Like he was very pleased with us. And in Psalm 37:4 it says, “Delight yourself in the LORD/Jehovah/Yahweh, and God will give you the desires of your heart.” …And now God wants us to sacrifice ourselves and our desires?

Um… That’s confusing. Especially when I imagine creating something good, whether it’s art or as a mom its even more clear (in as much as I can say I “created” my kids)…there’s no part of me that wants that creation to essentially kill itself. No! I love it! I want it flourish and be its best, fullest self.

When we read things like the Bible, we read it through the filter of our own culture, language, time, and understanding. When we look closer at these kinds of verses, we find that when Jesus says a person is to deny oneself, it’s totally possible we’ve misunderstood. For example, when Jesus says it in Matthew 16:24, in the original language, he uses a rather poetic play on words. He doesn’t use the usual word for self (like True Self) he uses a word that can mean something more like a hypnotic state of self. In today’s language we might refer to it as a False Self, ego, Tamed Self, or autopilot. Die to that? Ok, that could make more sense.

But trust our desires? …That’s another step.

There’s a fortune cookie/Santa/blank check way of reading that verse about God giving you the desires of your heart but I don’t think that’s the full picture. (Even though I think that can happen, too. You know, like, as a good parent: “If you, imperfect as you are, know how to lovingly take care of your children and give them what’s best, how much more ready is your heavenly Father to give wonderful gifts to those who ask him?” Matthew 7:11, the Passion Translation)

But I think a deeper way of seeing it is even more empowering than the blank check interpretation: Beyond God giving you the things you ask for, God gives you the desires in the first place.

What if our desires aren’t something God wants us to deny, but rather something God wants us bring into the world?!

I love how Glennon Doyle says it in Untamed:

“Following our deep desire always returns us to integrity. If your desire feels wrong to you: Go deeper. You can trust yourself. You just have to get low enough.

What women want is good. What women want is beautiful and what women want is dangerous, but not to women. Not to the common good. What women want is a threat to the injustice of the status quo.

If women trusted and claimed their desires, the world as we know it would crumble. Perhaps that is precisely what needs to happen so we can rebuild truer, more beautiful lives, relationships, families, and nations in their place.

Perhaps for us, the deepest truth is not what we can see, but what we can imagine. ...Imagination is how personal and worldwide revolutions began. ‘I have a dream,’ said MLK Jr. ‘Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning,’ said Gloria Steinem. In order to move our cultures forward, revolutionaries have had to speak and plan from the unseen order inside them. For those not consulted in the building of the visible order, igniting imagination is the only way to see beyond what was created to leave us out. If those who are not part of the building of reality only consult reality for possibilities, reality will never change. We will keep shuffling and competing for a seat at their table instead of building our own tables. We will keep banging our heads on their glass ceilings instead of pitching our own huge tent outside. We will remain caged by this world instead of taking our rightful place as co-creators of it.

Each of us was born to bring forth something that has never existed. We are here to fully introduce ourselves. To impose ourselves and thoughts and ideas and dreams onto the world. Leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths.”

And in her conversation with Brene Brown on Unlocking Us, Glennon continues:

“I know what women want… Women want a moment to take a deep breath and rest! Women want enough power and money to stop being afraid. Women want good food and good sex. Women want to find their purpose and unleash it and use it here in this life. Women want safety and food for their children and for all children, they want to look at their families and their communities and nation and see more love and less pain.

What women want is beautiful. The blueprints of Heaven are inside the deep desires of women. What women want is dangerous. Okay, but it's not dangerous to us and is not dangerous to our people. What women want is dangerous to power, is dangerous to status quo, is dangerous to the powers that be. Because if women returned to themselves and trusted themselves and went for what they want, imbalanced relationships would be balanced, broken relationships would be restored, corrupt institutions would crumble, unjust governments would topple. The world as we know it would end and that's exactly what we want to happen so that we can rebuild families and nations and communities based on justice and equality.”

Amen and hallelujah. (Which are not words that often come to mind but, in this case, somehow, that is what comes out.)

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P. S. It’s worth noting—this is not just women, and not even just a heart-centered, all the feels thing. In 2012 The Atlantic did a study with thousands of people asking what they thought wealth inequality currently looked like v. what it actually was v. what level inequality they felt was ideal. The study was “based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on). In terms of wealth, that means that people know everything about the wealth distribution and are willing to enter that society anywhere along the spectrum.”

Here were the outcomes (in kind of cheesy but clear graphics):

And there wasn’t even a big split between political parties (or gender)…

When we let go of pursuing what we think we should want for those deepest desires—the ones full of empathy and compassion for ourselves and others—beautiful things can happen.