The Desires of Our Hearts

“Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

— Psalm 37:4

We all have desires that we carry deep within our hearts. We long for love, companionship, healing, happiness, and peace. We ask God to ease our burdens, mend our broken hearts, and guide us toward a better life. Sometimes our prayers are answered in ways that seem almost miraculous. Other times, we pray for months or even years, only to find that nothing changes. When that happens, we may begin to wonder whether God is listening. After all, Psalm 37:4 tells us that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, God will give us the desires of our hearts. So why do so many of our prayers seem to go unanswered?

Perhaps the answer lies in understanding what it truly means to delight ourselves in the Lord. This verse is not a promise that God will grant our every wish. Faith is not a transaction in which we offer God our devotion in exchange for the things we want. Rather, delighting in the Lord means finding joy in God’s presence, trusting in God’s love, and allowing that love to shape the way we live. Sometimes the desires we believe will bring us happiness are not the desires that will ultimately bring us peace. Sometimes what we ask God to change is something God never intended us to change at all.

Love, too, is never transactional. Love is not something we earn by meeting someone else’s conditions, nor is it something that should be withdrawn when we fail to satisfy another person’s expectations. Yet many of us are told that if we are LGBTQ+, our families will withdraw their love. We may hear that we will no longer be welcome, that we have disappointed the people who raised us, or that we must change before we can be accepted again. Those messages can wound us deeply, especially when they come from the people whose love we have trusted most.

But that is not how love works. Love does not say, “I will love you if you become someone else.” Love does not make belonging dependent upon conformity. Love does not demand that we deny our identity, hide our relationships, or surrender the truth of who we are in order to remain worthy of care. When affection is offered only as a reward for obedience, it becomes conditional approval, not the self-giving love God calls us to embody.

For many LGBTQ+ Christians, this is an especially painful truth. I suspect that nearly every gay Christian who grew up believing homosexuality was sinful has, at some point, prayed not to be gay. We prayed to be straight, to be “normal,” to become the people our families, churches, and communities expected us to be. Some of us begged God night after night to take away our attraction to the same sex. We promised to be better Christians, to pray harder, to live more faithfully, if only God would grant us that one request. We believed that if we could change, we might finally be worthy of God’s love and acceptance.

But those prayers went unanswered.

For years, many of us interpreted that silence as a failure on our part. Perhaps we weren’t praying hard enough. Perhaps our faith wasn’t strong enough. Perhaps God was testing us, or worse, perhaps God had turned away from us. We carried shame and guilt for something we could not change, convinced that our inability to become straight meant we were somehow disappointing God.

Some of us also feared that our families would stop loving us if we told the truth about who we were. We may have believed that love could be taken away as punishment for being LGBTQ+. We may have tried to earn acceptance by hiding, apologizing, or promising to change. But our identity was never a moral failure, and our families’ love should never have been made conditional upon our ability to conform. We were not asking to be granted permission to exist. We were asking to be loved as the people we already were.

But what if we misunderstood God’s answer all along? What if God wasn’t refusing to listen, but was instead refusing to make us into someone we were never meant to be? What if the very thing we begged God to take away was part of the person God had lovingly created?

Psalm 139:14 reminds us, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Those words are not reserved for heterosexual Christians. They belong to all of God’s children. We are not mistakes that need correcting. We are not defective creations waiting to be repaired. We are human beings created in God’s image, capable of extraordinary love, compassion, kindness, and faith. Our sexuality does not diminish our worth in God’s eyes, nor does it place us beyond the reach of God’s grace.

When we begin to accept that truth, our understanding of unanswered prayers can change. Perhaps God did not make us straight because becoming someone we are not would never have brought us the joy we imagined. It might have satisfied the expectations of others, but at what cost to our own hearts and souls? A life spent denying who we are, hiding our capacity for love, and constantly fearing that God disapproves of us is hardly the abundant life Jesus spoke of in John 10:10.

That does not mean accepting ourselves guarantees a life of happiness without hardship. Living openly and authentically can bring rejection, discrimination, loneliness, and heartbreak. Some LGBTQ+ Christians lose the support of their families or the churches they once called home. Others struggle for years to overcome the shame they were taught to feel. Yet there is a profound difference between suffering because the world refuses to accept us and suffering because we have been taught to refuse to accept ourselves. We cannot always control how others treat us, but we can learn to stop believing that their condemnation speaks for God.

And when families withdraw their support, we should be honest about what has happened: the failure is not in the LGBTQ+ person who told the truth. The failure is in the belief that love can be used as leverage. A parent may feel confused, afraid, or unprepared, but those feelings do not justify withholding love. Family love should not be a prize awarded for heterosexuality, gender conformity, or religious agreement. It should be a commitment to remain present, to listen, to learn, and to honor the person who has always been part of the family.

Jesus taught that the greatest commandments are to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). Notice that Jesus did not tell us to love only those who look like us, believe exactly as we do, or conform to society’s expectations. Jesus commanded us to love. And that love includes recognizing our own worth as children of God. If we cannot see ourselves as worthy of love, how can we fully embrace the love God offers us or share it freely with others?

Love of neighbor also means refusing to make another person’s belonging conditional. We cannot claim to love someone while demanding that they erase themselves to remain welcome. We cannot tell LGBTQ+ people that they are loved and then withdraw family, community, or spiritual support when they live honestly. Love may require patience, growth, and difficult conversations, but it does not require rejection. Love can be truthful without being cruel, and it can hold convictions without withholding compassion.

Delighting ourselves in the Lord means more than attending church, reading Scripture, or saying our prayers. It means allowing God’s love to transform our hearts and guide our actions. It means showing compassion instead of judgment, offering kindness instead of condemnation, and recognizing the dignity of every human being. It means living a Christian life defined not by fear of punishment or the expectation of rewards, but by love itself.

And perhaps, as we grow in faith, the desires of our hearts begin to change. Instead of praying, “God, please make me someone else,” we may come to say, “God, help me become the person You created me to be.” Instead of begging God to take away our capacity to love, we may ask for the courage to love more deeply, more generously, and more faithfully. Instead of seeking the approval of those who condemn us, we may find peace in knowing that God’s grace has never depended upon their acceptance.

We may also begin to recognize the difference between love and approval. Not everyone will understand us, and not everyone will affirm our choices or identity. But no one has the right to make our basic worth dependent upon their approval. God’s love is not a contract that can be canceled when we disappoint someone. It is not a reward for performing correctly. It is a gift that reveals our worth before we have done anything to earn it.

Of course, unanswered prayers are not limited to our struggles with sexuality. We pray for loved ones who are ill, for relationships that have ended, for financial burdens to be lifted, and for suffering to cease. Sometimes the healing never comes, the relationship is never restored, or the circumstances never improve. We may never understand why. Faith does not require us to pretend that disappointment doesn’t hurt or that every tragedy is somehow a blessing in disguise. We can grieve, question, and even cry out to God in frustration while continuing to trust in God’s love.

When family relationships are broken, we may grieve the love we hoped to receive. We may mourn the parent, sibling, or relative who chose rejection over relationship. That grief is real, and we do not have to minimize it by pretending that everything is fine. At the same time, we can remember that another person’s refusal to love us well does not prove that we are unlovable. Sometimes the family we need is the family we find: friends, partners, affirming congregations, mentors, and communities that welcome us without demanding that we disappear.

Ultimately, our Christian hope extends beyond the circumstances of this earthly life. The greatest promise God has given us is not that we will receive everything we desire here on earth, but that through God’s grace we may share in eternal life with God. Revelation 21:4 offers a beautiful vision of that promise: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the former things have passed away.”

What a glorious promise that is. A day when there will be no more rejection, no more shame, no more loneliness, and no more suffering. A day when we will no longer question whether we are worthy of God’s love because we will dwell forever in its fullness.

But we need not wait until heaven to begin experiencing the joy of that love. We can find it here, in the kindness we show others, in the relationships we nurture, in the compassion we extend to those who are hurting, and in the freedom of living truthfully as the people God created us to be. We can practice a love that does not keep score, demand repayment, or disappear when someone becomes difficult to understand. We can create families and communities where belonging is not conditional and where every person is treated as a beloved child of God.

Perhaps that is one of the greatest lessons of Psalm 37:4. God does not always give us what we ask for, and we may never understand every unanswered prayer. But when we delight ourselves in the Lord, when we open our hearts to God’s grace and allow God’s love to guide our lives, we may discover that some of the things we once begged God to change were never wrong in the first place.

We may spend years asking God to make us different, only to discover that the answer we needed was God’s invitation to love and accept the person we have always been. We may spend years fearing that our families will withdraw their love, only to learn that love worthy of the name does not depend upon our conformity. And as we journey through this imperfect world, loving God and loving one another, we can rest in the promise that the greatest joy of all still awaits us: an eternity in the presence of the One whose love has never failed us.

May we carry that love into the world. May we reject the shame and fear that tell people they must become someone else to be worthy of God’s grace. May we refuse to use love as a reward or belonging as a bargaining tool. May we honor the dignity of every person, welcome those who have been pushed aside, and help create families and communities where LGBTQ+ people can live truthfully, love faithfully, and know that they belong. And when we face unanswered prayers, may we remember that silence is not proof of abandonment, that rejection is not proof of unworthiness, and that our worth has never depended on becoming anyone other than the person God created us to be.