Desires are a natural part of us. Most of us want more. But what we really want is more life, not the accumulation of more status, more achievement, more wealth, more stuff. When we try to fulfill our natural desire for more with those lesser things, while they might give us a short-term high, we always find ourselves eventually desiring still more… because, in truth, the deepest desire of our souls was never met in those things.
But when I say that, don’t mistake it for meaning that the material things of life are unimportant; that’s not what I mean at all. In fact, if we approach the materiality of life from a soul-centered perspective, they can help us experience great delight. We can be led deeper into joy.
In his book, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?, Lewis Smedes puts it this way: “Most of us spend our time crawling, groping, climbing, sometimes running, but always moving like the works of a clock. But now and then joy comes to arrest the motion; it stops the tedious taking of our life-clocks with the bracing discovery that we have received a gift. It works most magnificently when we feel our own life as if it were God’s gift to us... There comes a sense that life - now, here, today - is a gift worth blessing God for. When it comes, when this sends of being a gift comes, joy has come to us. Joy is not just the experience of God, thank God, though being with him, in the sight of his beauty, will be the ultimate joy. Not the least gift of grace is our joy in creaturely things. God is so great that he doesn’t need to be our only joy. There is an earthly joy, a joy of the outer as well as the inner self, the joy of dancing as well as kneeling, the joy of playing as well as praying. Any moment that opens us up to the reality that life is good is a parable of the supreme end for which we were made.”
You were made by God. even our physical selves are in some mysterious way an echo of the Divine. We all have physical desires, appetites that need to be fed to satisfy our need for food, drink, and physical touch. So it’s no surprise that throughout scripture we find God instructing the Israelites to feast, to drink and celebrate, to sing and dance and shout. These are all physical means of delighting in life… and a means by which we are reminded that life is good… because it reflects the goodness of God.