I just don't have a desire for strong liquor, wild women or gay show tunes...*

7 But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”   1 Samuel 16:7 (NIV)









I love each of the post this week from my fellow Kingdom Bloggers. The desire of the heart is as unique and characteristic to an individual as a fingerprint, and comes to fruition from a number of variables that we each develop and experience as we grow.


David Johndrow started the week with a wonderful promise from God found in a psalm of King David. In Acts 13:22, Paul is laying the Good News out to the Jews (and even the Gentiles who worshipped God) by preaching to them about the chosen history of Israel that had been directed by God's hand. How God had found David to be a man after His own heart, and from his lineage had come the Savior of all mankind, Jesus Christ.

I personally find great hope in David's story because his journey for God is one that strays from the path on occasion. There is great solace in the fact God can use us for His glory even though we start broken and are prone to disrepair along the way.

My heart's desire was once focused on the dream of becoming an astronaut. I planned and plotted the path my life would follow: after high school, college, commissioning in the USMC, flight school, fighter pilot, couple of tours, test-pilot school, and on to NASA. For once, my height played to my advantage because astronauts are preferred to be under 6 feet tall. While my desire to play college football was smashed by my stature, the bigger price was still in hand. I had my course charted.

Problem was...God wasn't in it. I had moved away from Him and seeking His will for my life. That's why when  the wheels came off the cart, I found myself completely lost in the darkness. I couldn't pass a flight school eye exam. From the word go...my dream was over. I plotted and schemed to find a way around the one limitation that had become the closed door in my path. The thing I didn't do...I couldn't do...was pray for God's help. I was swimming in unconfessed sins and the desire of my heart revolved around a path I had never stopped to check with my Father about. So endeth the lesson for this grasshopper...

Today, my heart's desire is completely focused on God's will for my life. I long to be closer to Him, for my family to be closer to Him. I pray to be a man likened to God's own heart...like David. Rarely do I dwell on my shortcomings but rather examine the root causes to avoid them in the future. I start each day mentally reciting the words of Jesus concerning the greatest commandments. I yearn for His return and to be in His presence. I seek after the face of God...

My true heart's desire.


The reality that God will do what and when He wants keeps me grounded. The verifiable truth that I fail Him each and every day and to live up to a standard worthy of His love also drives me...motivates me...to never accept spiritual defeat...ever! I must humbly accept without my Father eternal death is my sentence. To be separated from true love forever...

The very antithesis of my heart's desire.



* The title of this post comes from a conversation I had just today with one of my Italian customers. At the end of every conversation we've ever had, this gentleman will ask me, in his heavily accented voice, if I'm going home to enjoy 'the Jack Daniels' this evening. I guess people in Italy have people from Tennessee stereotyped just as we stereotype them (he hates spaghetti I've learned). At the end of our telephone conversation this morning, he posed the question once again, and I gave him the above title answer. He laughed about the gay show tunes...