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Delight

             Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)

Delight: please (someone) greatly

 

How does a person delight in anything? Yes, I’m trying to put delight on the table so we can examine it. This leads to two more questions. How do we recognize delight? How do we sustain it?

Last night, I watched an episode of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett as the famed detective. I’m also listening to The Scandal in Bohemia on CD. Three things for which Holmes is renowned are his passion for mysteries and puzzles, his logical mind, and his use of cocaine to endure the times in which his mind is not occupied. I like Brett’s interpretation of Holmes, but last night, I noticed that when problems or ideas were introduced, he expanded like a sponge soaking up water. He lit up. He paid attention. It was almost as if the robot came suddenly to life or like a child reaching for something new. Even if the child were incapable of speech, everything about him says, “Gimme! Gimme!   Gimme!”

The sponge and child illustrations generate a little of the sponge and child responses in me. These work for me as pictures of delight. This, then, is the picture of how we are to respond to the Lord, but let me be clear. The delight is in the Lord. My mother worked in a store, and I recall (or imagine) myself jumping up from behind the stove with, “Did you bring me anything?” If she had, what short-term delight I would have experienced would have been with the thing, not her.

Another picture of delight is the idea of choices. There are people in my park who play pickleball for hours on end. Sometimes, they almost seem offended that the park owner doesn’t put up a multi-million dollar facility just for pickleball. They would pick pickleball over most other things if given a choice between pickleball and some other activity.

To delight ourselves in the Lord involves opening up toward, drawing in, and (at least in a sense) attempting to possess Him.

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