I Want God Most

You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. — Matthew 22:37

Before I started writing this book, I started shopping.

It’s summer, that glorious time when my kids’ legs are tanned from outside play, grill smells live in my nostrils, and I dive deep into mommy waters while the writer sleeps by the pool. I like to shop, and when the writer is asleep, I seem to shop more. But really, it’s about something else:

sometimes I don’t want to hear from God, and shopping helps with that.

I think, and I know, that this moment is not about the shopping (because it rarely is). I recognize it as the human impulse of storing up, controlling my world before He starts requiring something of me. When you know God in that intimate way, there is an understanding that when He calls, it will be loud. And it will be specific. And it may require other things to go away. And it’s terrifying.

So I shop.

But even as I sit in the parking lot of this antique mall with all my precious finds perched around me, I know it is a myth, the storing up. For a brief moment the shopper subsides and the writer awakens. I take out my phone and go to my notes and the fingers start running and running fast.

It’s all a myth. Chasing this kind of more only brings the foggy high and runs up the bills, and in the end it is the same choice as it was yesterday: Out of life, what do I want the most? (That is the question. That is always the question.)

But in the meantime, the shopping has gotten almost weird and manic — like I am ravenous for change. I feel the change coming, the unraveling that happens when I start writing a new book and, mostly, I want Him to change me but the house is screaming so loud for me to pay it attention instead that I am nearly going deaf. In its every square foot I see imperfection and I want to make it beautiful, and it already is.

I shop because it helps me forget I may never do the everything for God both of us want. And the reality of that feels painful.

But no matter how much I shop, I will never be able to muffle Him.

Because He haunts me. Yes, haunts. Not in the creepy, scary-movie way where it’s about some broken-down clapboard house with squeaky floors and curtains of cobwebs and that guy who died who now lives under the house and occasionally emerges wearing a mask. He haunts me in the unrequited-love kind of way, whereby you love someone so much it aches and their scent doesn’t go away no matter how much you try to scrub it off yourself.

So in the end, after the shopping, I will come back to the same. I’ll just have less money.

What I’m really wanting, is not to tear my house apart and put it back together more beautifully, but what I want God to do to me: deconstruct me, clean me up, make me better, streamlined, more beautiful. And at the same time, I’m scared He will.

This is the rub of my life.

The words are now done and the writer goes back to sleep. I have dialogued with no one in particular, but I have somehow worked it all out.

• God is what I want most.

Other things will scream for my attention. I will have to choose between them.

It is the same for you.

Excerpted with permission from I Want God by Lisa Whittle, copyright Lisa Whittle.

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Your Turn

Does this hit home for you? I does for me. I absolutely distract myself from God sometimes because I don’t want to hear from Him right then, or I want to make myself feel better, or the noise of life has just gotten too loud. The truth is that what we need most is God. Him. Full stop. Nothing else. Right? ~ Laurie McClure, Faith.Full