by Rachel Schmoyer I felt restless. Unsettled. This feeling was illogical. Nothing on the surface of my day to day life had changed. I was still cooking, cleaning, teaching Sunday School, directing Vacation Bible School, reading voraciously—all the things I’ve always loved and longed to do. However, I noticed I didn’t have a driving passion for them anymore.

At first, I thought my restlessness was because God wanted to move our family to Africa, but nope. After my husband returned from a missions trip to Tanzania, he didn’t say “pack up we are moving.” Instead, he said, “I am more convinced we are exactly where we are supposed to be.” For him, that meant a renewed passion for ministry. For me, that meant I was stuck.

I was stumped. What was missing? Was their something else I was supposed to be doing? Why didn’t I feel like doing all the things I had always wanted to do? Since I wasn’t able to figure this out on my own, I asked my older and wiser friend. After listening carefully, she shared Psalm 37:4.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

I was surprised she choose this verse. Normally, this is a go-to verse for those who want something and need to know if God wants them to have it.

Something like this:

I want a new car.

Does God want me to have a new car? I don’t know. How can I find out?

I’ll delight myself in the Lord to check to see if God wants me to have a new car, too.  

The problem is, this litmus test approach to the verse is backwards. It puts the desire first and follows it up with delight. However, in the verse, the delight comes first before the desire.

My job was not to focus on myself and my desires. My job was to delight myself in the Lord.

Psalm 46:10 puts it a different way.

“Cease striving and know that I am God.”

The answer to the restless feeling in my soul was not to frantically search for a desire. That would be striving, trying to fix my life in my own strength. The solution to my unsettledness was to delight myself in the Lord. These verses were like a sigh of relief after holding my breath for too long. I began to replace my restlessness with a season of freedom to delight in the Lord.

What does it look like to delight yourself in the Lord?

• Read. Spend time in God’s word, delighting in His promises and His plan.
• Pray. Not just a list of requests, but praise, delighting in who God is.
• Rejoice. Delight in what the Lord has done for His people in the past. Not just the long past, but the recent past, too.

The result of my season of delighting was that God gave me a desire to write. Writing had not been on my radar—ever. This passion could only have come from delighting in Him. My challenge now is to keep delighting in Him so that every one of my writing goals is a desire from Him.

You might be in a season of unsettled. You may have a life transition coming up and you don’t know what your role will be in that transition. Maybe you don’t know what you want to be when you “grow up.”

Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Rachel Schmoyer is a pastor’s wife and a mom of four in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She writes at Read the Hard Parts (https://readthehardparts.com/) to encourage and equip Christians to find simple truths in complex Bible passages. Her devotionals have been published in Light from the Word, The Secret Place, and The Quiet Hour. You can connect with her on Facebook @ReadtheHardParts, Twitter @schmoyer_rachel, and Instagram @schmoyer_rachel.