“Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while, you start throwing people out. Your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The life boat is still sinking and you know it’s going to take you down with it” excerpt from the book shantaram.
I'm currently reading the book 'Shantaram' and the excerpt above gave me a picture of how deadly it is to be desperate for love. There’s something tragically comical about desperation. It’s like sitting in a sauna for hours, every sense of reason is steamed out of you and you’re a hot mess of foolishness in the end. Drained of every common sense.
It’s a good feeling to want something, but when we get desperate, we’re a time bomb waiting to explode. Our judgment becomes flawed, bad begins to look like all things great, bright and beautiful… We're so blinded by the sting in our feet to move forward that we fail to notice how much we stink, not even when we gag from our own stench.
A woman desperate for love looses herself in the sea of flawed illusions, just like the quote from the book says, she keeps holding on even as she begins to feel the life boat sinking with her, because false hope is better than waiting, and racing against the psychological clock of time beats not knowing. You can’t always trust your judgment when you’ve been on the bottommost side of down for so long.
Desperate for a husband/wife, you find yourself married to a beast. Desperate for bread, and you find yourself chewing on stone. Being desperate takes you to a boutique of optical illusion, where dresses of your desires are displayed on mannequins of lies.
But thank God for God. He knows just how desperate we can be, thus he opens his arms to invite us to come into his rest… “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28) His rest is the only thing that saves us from the shackles of desperateness. His rest doesn't stop us from desiring things, but it gives us a confident assurance that it is ours in his time, which is the right time.
In good time, all things we hope for will come to pass as long as we hold on to our source. We've been such slaves to our desperate desires for so long. It's time to let go of the craziness of being desperate and grab at God's rest.