Delight yourself

Psalm 37:4
“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

I have been feeling rather undelightful the past couple of days. Nothing is really wrong, just kind of wallowing around in an icky kinda funk. I keep reading stories of people who are going through so much more than I could imagine. Really, I have it pretty darn good. So…there I am comparing myself to others, to their thoughts and emotions and wondering why I seem so undelightful. Thinking I know what they are thinking and feeling, and reminding myself that I don’t measure up.

There is a problem with comparing ourselves to others, and depending on others for our emotional cues, the problem is we really don’t know what they are thinking or feeling. We only know what they present on the outside, and the assumptions we make on our own. And oftentimes, we are left feeling as if we are less than enough because we aren’t handling life as well as “they” are. So now, not only are we in a kind of icky undelightful funk probably due to hormones or something, we are in even more of a funk because we “shouldn’t” be in a funk. And let the spiraling of internal dialogue begin: I feel icky, I shouldn’t feel icky, other people aren’t feeling icky, why do I feel icky, what is wrong with me, I must not be normal, and on and on and on it goes – until whammo! – something whacks us in the head making us realilze how unbelievably ridiculous it all sounds.

What choice do we have then when we are in an icky funk? Delight YOURSELF in the Lord. Don’t expect someone else to pick you up and delight you, don’t spend hours ruminating on the undelightful, but find what is delightful and DELIGHT YOURSELF in the LORD!!! He is something stable. He is the one person who we know exactly what He is thinking about us all the time, “I love you, and I forgive you”, and that’s something worth delighting over.

Seeking delight in other people or things will never fill the deep down yearning desire in our hearts. It may soothe the icky funk for a moment, but it is not lasting. What is the desire of your heart? And How can you delight yourself in Him so that He can give you the desires of your heart?