Developing Desires

I’ve been listening to the book Terre des Hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and in it he told the story of being stranded in the Sahara desert after a plane crash.  After having been several days there with little to eat or drink he and his companion miraculously found an orange in the plane debris.  He wrote, “Les hommes ne savent pas ce qu’est une orange…. Cette demi-orange que je serre dans la main m’apporte une des plus grandes joies de ma vie” (“People don’t know what an orange is…. This half-orange that I hold in my hand has given me one of the greatest joys in my life”).  To him the orange was so incredible because his hunger and thirst were so great—it was his burning desire for something to quell his thirst and hunger that made the orange so incredibly valuable.  As I thought about this I was reminded of the famous statement by President Benson about the Savior: “Just as a man does not really desire food until he is hungry, so he does not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ.”  What Christ has to offer us is always the same—just as the orange that Saint-Exupéry ate in the desert was really no different than an orange he would have eaten anywhere else—but our level of desire to receive the Savior’s help and grace in our lives will greatly affect what kind of spiritual encounter we have with God. 

                One of the great challenges we have, I think, is then to have a strong desire to know the things of God.  Alma puts this desire as the very basic building block of exercising faith: “Awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words” (Alma 32:27).  To develop any kind of faith we must first start with a desire to know God and develop a relationship with Him.  But how do we get that desire?  I remember once as a missionary someone asking me this question; basically she thought she should serve a mission but she didn’t really have the desire to, so how could she develop that desire?  In other words if you desire to have a desire, how do you get it?  It seems that the way Alma 32 answers that question is that you have to go forward with the experiment and plant the seed: “Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief… ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me” (Alma 32:28).  In other words, we have to do what the word tells us to do, and then if it is a “good seed” it will eventually be “delicious” to us and we will desire it.  It was this kind of idea I think behind the Savior’s invitation: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself” (John 7:17).  Put in other words, you get a spiritual witness after you do those things required for it.  To get a testimony of the blessings of tithing you have to pay it; if you wait to pay it until you have a sure witness of how it will bless you and a strong desire to pay it, you likely never will. 

                The other way that we develop desires for the things of God is through the trials that God gives us.  That seems to be one of the reasons that we have to face struggles in this life—they can lead us to seek after the Savior and our Father in Heaven.  Mormon put it this way in a somewhat bleak summary of what it takes to get this kind of desire in us: “And thus we see that except the Lord doth chasten his people with many afflictions, yea, except he doth visit them with death and with terror, and with famine and with all manner of pestilence, they will not remember him” (Helaman 12:3).  It is the times when things are really bad and we are really struggling that in general our prayers are the most earnest and we seek most diligently to commune with the Lord.  I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing as long as the times when we are not struggling we are still reaching out to the Lord—that seems to be where most of us fail.  If we don’t, then in our times of difficultly the Lord may say of us as He said of the early Saints: “In the day of their peace they esteemed lightly my counsel; but, in the day of their trouble, of necessity they feel after me” (D&C 101:8).  We must learn to cultivate our own desires to seek after the Lord at all times no matter what our circumstances happen to be at the moment.  Coming to know and obey Him who is the “desire of all nations” should be our constant desire (Haggai 2:7).