When Desire Goes Quiet
A Reflection on Desire and Trust
Most people don’t wake up one day and decide to shut their desire down. It happens gradually, quietly, almost responsibly. There’s no denying it, desire becomes complicated. It asks for things we’re not sure we’re allowed to want. It exposes longings we don’t have language for. It brings us face-to-face with disappointment—both with ourselves (this one hurts) and, if we’re honest, with God (this one hurts even more). So we do what many of us were trained to do:
We manage it.
We spiritualize it.
We minimize it.
We distract ourselves from it.
From the outside, this can look like maturity. It can look like restraint or self-control. Where I am from, it can even look devout. But often what’s really happening is something closer to resignation, a giving up of sorts. We haven’t grown past desire; we’ve grown tired of being disappointed by it. We’ve grown tired of feeling that God is disappointed in us for it.
The Subtle Trade We Make
At some point, many of us make a subtle trade—less disappointment in exchange for less desire. We stop expecting much from relationships, from work, and eventually from God. We keep things practical and reasonable. We tell ourselves we’re being wise, realistic, and grown-up. But the cost of that trade is almost always the same. The story becomes smaller. Life becomes narrower. Joy shows up less often and with less intensity. Faith becomes something we think about rather than something we experience. Seeing this last one rips my heart out.
Underneath it all, there’s often a low-grade ache we can’t quite name. Not pain exactly, but absence. A sense that something vital has gone missing, and we’re not sure when—or if—we gave it away. For the record, this is exactly the place our enemy waits for us with tepid solution after tepid solution, one more addicting and less satisfying than the last, all, in the end, terribly costly.
Desire Is Not the Problem
This matters because many of us were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that desire itself is dangerous. If you haven’t recognized this before, stop here and let that sink in for a moment. We learned that if we want too much, we’ll be disappointed. That if we name what we long for, we’ll either be shamed or let down. That strong desire leads to sin, weakness, or foolishness. So instead of learning how to bring desire into relationship, we learned how to control it (or not) in isolation.
But here’s the freeing truth most will never hear: desire is not the enemy.
Disconnection is.
Desire only becomes destructive when it’s isolated—when it has no place to go, no relationship to live inside of, no larger story to belong to. When desire is left alone, it always tries to take care of itself. That’s when it turns compulsive, or numb, or corrosive. Not because its root is evil, but because it’s been orphaned, kidnapped out of the relationship it was meant to thrive in, a relationship with God.
Why Control Feels Safer Than Trust
In my life, almost without realizing it, control became emotional protection. I don’t think I’m alone in this. For many people, control is learned early—sometimes from inconsistent parenting, sometimes from spiritual environments that emphasized behavior over honesty, sometimes from experiences where vulnerability was met with punishment, ridicule, or silence. These are all part of life, really.
Over time, we learn that trust feels risky while control feels responsible. So we manage our desires instead of bringing them into relationship, especially with God. And the problem with control isn’t that it doesn’t work. The problem is that it works just enough to keep us stuck.
The Quiet Drift From God
One of the most painful aspects of this pattern is what it does to our experience of God. We still believe all the right things. We still show up. We still serve, pray, read, and lead. It’s hard to think of these things as traps, isn’t it? Even while doing these things, something shifts. God becomes someone we believe in rather than someone we relate to. Prayer becomes functional and formulaic. Scripture becomes informative and argumentative. Worship becomes observational and cultural.
Most times, we don’t even realize what’s happening until we feel strangely distant from the very God we’re trying to follow. Often, it’s not rebellion or disbelief. It’s more subtle than that. It’s mistrust. We begin to be guided by this question: Is God actually good with what I want? Not in theory. Not theologically. But personally.
When Desire Goes Underground
Here’s a small nuance I want to bring forward: when desire doesn’t feel safe to bring into relationship with God, it doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It shows up sideways—through things like overwork, fantasy, anger, compulsive behaviors, perfectionism, or coping. For some of us, it emerges through even more destructive patterns like substance abuse, pornography, or alcoholism. Other times it hides inside things that look productive or even virtuous. These productive and virtuous things can be silent killers.
Eventually, shame enters the picture. Not the sharp, dramatic kind, but the low-grade, chronic fever kind that says to us, “Something is wrong with you.” Shame convinces us that the problem is the strength of our desire rather than the loneliness of it. So we double down on self-management, and the cycle continues. Shame loves a cycle, especially one that feeds itself.
Jesus Does Not Scold Desire
One of the most overlooked aspects of Jesus’ ministry is how often He engages people at the level of desire. He asks questions like, “What do you want me to do for you?” and “Do you want to be healed?” He issues invitations rather than demands. He doesn’t begin by correcting motives; he begins by inviting honesty about them. Isn’t that refreshing? Imagine if more of our human relationships operated this way.
Jesus doesn’t shame longing. He names it, draws it out, and brings it into relationship. This matters because many of us assume that spiritual maturity means wanting less. But the gospel tells a much different story. Redemption doesn’t begin when desire disappears. It begins when desire is no longer alone, when it’s brought into the loving light of a relationship with the Maker.
Rescue Is Different Than Restraint
This solution feels so counterintuitive. It just can’t be true. So, this is where many people get stuck. We assume the solution to distorted desire is stronger restraint—more discipline, better habits, tighter boundaries. Don’t get me wrong, those things have their place, but they are not the starting point. Restraint without rescue just creates a more sophisticated form of isolation.
What desire actually needs is not suppression but saving. It needs to be rescued from the false beliefs it learned while it was alone. Rescued from the conclusion that it must fend for itself. Rescued from the lie that God is distant, disappointed, or dangerous. This is slow work. Relational work. Often unsettling work. But it’s the only work that actually leads to freedom. Thankfully, I know hundreds of men and women who would testify to this.
Why This Feels Threatening
If this stirs something uncomfortable in you, that makes sense. Letting desire come to the light feels risky, especially if you’ve spent years managing life by staying in control. Trusting God with what you want can feel far more dangerous than simply keeping your wants small. Trust opens the door to disappointment, to grief, to accountability, and to refinement.
It also opens the door to intimacy, to healing, and to becoming honest again. And honesty, while costly, is where transformation actually begins. Even if you haven’t interacted much with the Bible, you can skip through the Psalms and be exposed to some of the most brutal honesty ever recorded. Here are just two examples:
“The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies. O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!” Psalm 58:3&6
“O LORD, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless. Your wrath has swept over me; your dreadful assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long; they close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.” Psalm 88:14-18
That’s honest. And, based on the fact that God included it in the Scriptures for all of us for all of time, it must be something he desires for us to emulate.
Conclusion
If desire has been a place of confusion or frustration for you, I get it. I want you to know it is not evidence of God’s distance. It is often the place He chooses to work most directly. God’s love does not avoid our misdirected desires, nor does it wait for them to be properly ordered before He engages us. He meets us there, not to shame us, but to mature us.
Throughout Scripture, God consistently begins His work not by removing desire but by redirecting it. He takes what is strong but disordered and slowly reshapes it through relationship. What we experience as weakness or internal conflict is often the very material God uses to form discernment and depth. Desire often becomes the training ground where trust is learned.
This is why growth so often begins in the places we would prefer to bypass. The longings that feel risky, the wants that have gone sideways, the hopes we’ve tried to manage or minimize—these are not obstacles to spiritual formation. Miraculously, God uses them as a starting point. God does not waste these places. He enters them, stays with us in them, and works patiently with us.
So if desire feels unsettled, that doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong. It may mean something new is starting. God’s work is rarely loud or immediate, but it is always purposeful. Again and again, He chooses to bring life not in spite of our desire, but through it.
Healing doesn’t begin when desire disappears. It begins when desire is brought into the care of a God who is committed to our growth.
If this post has caused questions—or named something that feels more true than you expected—you don’t need to settle it here.
There is a conversation that goes further. In my interview with **Nathan Chapman** on the **Off Axis**
podcast, we spend more time inside these themes: how desire becomes misdirected, what it means for it to be rescued rather than managed, and the way God often works most patiently in the very places we’d rather move past.
That episode is available to paid Substack subscribers and is part of the larger arc for my work in 2026. Subscriptions are $7 a month and support my continued writing and conversations. You can find that episode by clicking the button at the end of this post.
This describes my life