Ps. 20:4-5  “May He grant you your heart’s desire and fulfill all your plans!  May we shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God!  May the LORD fulfill all your petitions.”

Last night, we got to spend a few hours at what is, for us, the real kick-off of the Christmas season – a dear friend’s annual open house.  The Schmidts were the first other homeschoolers we ever met, and we’ve known them since our now 28 year old daughters were 5.  (See why this open house tradition is such a part of our Christmas?)  It’s always so good to see other long-time friends from our early homeschooling days and catch up on what all the kids are doing.  Since Kae’s kids are there, though now grown, there’s always a crowd of the younger generation who have grown up together, too, and it is great fun to watch year to year as they bloom in adulthood.  A few are married, some of those with kids of their own now, but many are still single.

Kae’s younger daughter is married and has a 4 yr. old, Savvy.  Kae’s older daughter, Auntie Riah, is still single.  Savvy doesn’t understand this, of course.  To her, all Big People should aspire to have kids.  So, last night, we were amused when Savvy sat down by one of the other still-single friends in the Auntie Riah circle and began pointing out salient good features of all the eligible (i.e. childless and relatively young) men in the room.  “He’s very tall.”  “He has a nice nose.”  “He has beautiful eyes.”  It was too much for the poor victim of such a bald-faced attempt at match-making, and she found somewhere else to go.  It wouldn’t have fazed Riah, though, because you see, she is not just single, but is happily and most emphatically so.  She harbors no desire whatsoever to marry, let alone to have children.

There are many women for whom having a child is their deepest desire, who long desperately to be a mother by birth, not adoption.  The reproductive industry is proof of that.  Although fertility treatments and in vitro fertilization are terribly expensive, couples spend thousand and even hundreds of thousands in pursuit of having a biological child.  Churches sometime hold special prayer services just to pray for the Lord to open the wombs of the childless.  I expect we all know at least one or two couples struggling with the crushing disappointment as month after month goes by and “Aunt Flo” keeps showing up, or they achieve pregnancy and pregnancy but lose the baby after only a few weeks. 

This desire for a child isn’t new.  It’s as old as mankind.  In Biblical times, there was an added pressure to it.  There was a cultural assumption made that being barren meant that God didn’t like you.  Now, God never said that.  Yes, there were times that He closed wombs as a specific response to situations that didn’t please Him – think of Abimilech’s wives and slave girls when he married Sarah, or of Rachel when God saw that she was loved and Leah was not.  Nowhere did He make a general statement that “no children=lack of God’s favor”, but that didn’t stop people from assuming that correlation. 

For a woman who doesn’t want children, or want more children, menopause comes as a relief.  That’s one issue she’ll never again even have to think about, whew!  But for a woman who wants children, it’s a death-knell to hopes and dreams.  It’s a once and for all “Never!”  Such was the case of Mary’s relative, Elizabeth.  As it had been with Sarah, Elizabeth was “advanced in years”.  Her child-bearing days were over.  Since there isn’t a single reference in Scripture to another late-life pregnancy such as Sarah’s, I doubt that Elizabeth held on to even the slightest hope of ever being a mother.  That didn’t mean she didn’t still hold a desire, an “I wish I could have been a mother”, deep in her heart.  But she had resigned herself to her “reproach” among the people.  When she became pregnant, Elizabeth may have found expression for her feelings in these verses, for God certainly had granted her heart’s desire and granted her petition.  Her neighbors certainly rejoiced with her in God’s mercy.  Another Sarah story right in their own town!

But in looking at the wonder of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, it’s easy to lose sight of something more important.  Yes, one heart’s desire was granted in becoming pregnant, but was having a child her most fundamental heart’s desire?  We are told of Zechariah and Elizabeth that “they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord.”  You don’t get that kind of a write-up unless your deepest heart’s desire is, in fact, to be obedient to God’s  Word, to walk steadfastly with Him, and to accept His will for your life, no matter what it is.  It means her heart was set first on the Lord, and all other things were secondary.  There’s nothing that indicates that Elizabeth felt that God owed her a child simply because she wanted one, or because she had walked faithfully with Him for so many years.  I think she was like Job, who also is said to have been “blameless and upright”, whose attitude was that God had the right to give or take away – or, in Elizabeth’s case, to not give in the first place.  If God had not given her that child, she would have gone right on walking blamelessly, righteous before God, counting the reproach of man over her childlessness as less important than the approval of her God.

God will or will not grant our heart’s other desires based on what serves His purposes, but the desire to walk closely with Him will ALWAYS be granted to His children who seek Him.