Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my current relationship has unfolded with so much ease.

Not because there’s no challenge—there has been incredible grief, growth, and vulnerability—but because from the very beginning, I was clear.

Clear about what I wanted. Clear about what I was available for. Clear about what I was seeking to build.

That clarity made all the difference.

I didn’t have to force anything into place. I didn’t have to contort myself to fit. I didn’t have to grasp or perform or settle.

The clarity of my desires became an invitation—a quiet allurement—for what was truly aligned to rise and meet me.

Clarity arrived in two ways: one sudden, and one slow.

There was the lightning flash—a morning at the beginning of last year, while in prayer and dance after a somatic session, when I encountered divine presence so vividly that all my inner truths felt completely exposed. I dropped deeper into my body, and in an instant, I could no longer hide from the truth: the three-year relationship I had poured so much of my heart into, though full of love and care, was not the partnership my soul longed for. Our desires weren’t aligned, and once I admitted that, what once seemed good enough suddenly became impossible to stay in. What had felt acceptable now felt off in my body. My sexual boundaries narrowed overnight.

Then came the slow clarity. After ending that relationship, I spent a season in between, dating beautiful, wonderful men who opened me to new dimensions of intimacy and sweetness. But I was clear from the beginning: this is what I want. This is what I’m available for. Not as an ultimatum—but as devotion to my own heart. Holding clear boundaries—emotional, physical, spiritual—helped protect the sacred space where real listening could happen.

I stopped entertaining relationships that were almost right but not quite what I wanted. I didn’t have to make anyone wrong. I didn’t have to abandon myself. I could love people and still walk away when our lives didn’t align. Saying no to those relationships broke my heart. Many parts of me wanted to stay, to compromise, to make it work.

But each time I walked away from something almost right, something inside me sharpened.

Slowly, achingly, my longing clarified itself:
I wanted a man rooted in God,
a steady, kind presence,
someone whose mission and vision braided with mine,
a shared creative life held in devotion and joy.

In that season, I realized how much confusion modern dating culture sows:

Keep your options open. Be chill. Don't talk about the long term. Sleep together first. Test the waters. Stay vague. Stay open. Go with the flow.

Underneath all of it is the same hidden message:

Don't name what you want, or you’ll scare love away.

But my experience taught me something different. The more honest I became about what I longed for, the more I actually attracted what I wanted. Clear desire didn’t collapse possibility. It revealed true alignment.

In a culture addicted to ambiguity, that confuses detachment for freedom, clairty of desire is radical.

As I named what I sought—partnership, marriage, family, devotion—it didn’t limit me. It simply closed the wrong doors faster. It protected the sacredness of my longing. It saved me, again and again, from investing myself in what could never become what I truly wanted.

When I finally dared to admit what I wanted—without shrinking or apologizing for the fullness of my longing—the one who could meet me in that longing appeared, and everything aligned in a way that felt both impossible and inevitable.

What I learned isn’t just about dating.
It’s about everything.

It’s about the courage to admit that I want what I want. To name my hunger without apology. To trust that clear longing is not a burden, but a blessing.

The more clearly and honestly I admit my desires, the more quickly they arrive.

Desires that once felt far away are suddenly arriving—right on time. It’s not because I’m trying harder. It’s because clarity cuts through confusion. Clarity creates coherence, and life is magnetized to coherence.

Clarity is not harshness; it is kindness. Clarity is a knife that slices through the almosts, the shoulds, the good-enoughs.

It’s the invitation to move toward what I want most, even if it means leaving something safe behind.

My story in love is a small window into a larger dance—the dangerous, beautiful work of letting clear longing turn everything upside down.

Clarity in the closet

Before I learned this in dating, I learned it in my closet.

A couple years ago, I went through everything I owned, Marie-Kondo style. I picked up each object—each dress, mug, half-read book—and asked myself: Does this spark joy? Over and over, I found myself wanting to justify keeping things I didn’t actually love or desire. It was expensive. Maybe I’ll use it someday. It’s still perfectly good. But when I quieted the noise and listened deeper, the answer was almost always clear: No. I began to get familiar with how my body experienced true desire - a sense of lightness, openness, a subtle pull forward - and untangle that from the mental stories of guilt, scarcity, and justification.

Each release was practice.
Each small letting go trained me to trust a deeper yes and no.
Each moment with my mundane possessions was a microcosm of a deeper spiritual muscle: the willingness to get honest. The willingness to feel what’s true without needing to justify it. The willingness to let go.

Discernment doesn’t start in the mind. It begins in the body. It lives not in rational explanations, but in the raw, embodied truth that rises before the mind has time to negotiate.

And when we start to listen for what we truly want, it can feel frightening. Even dangerous.

That’s because it is.

Desire as holy rebellion

Clarity is dangerous to the systems that benefit from our confusion. It threatens the false stories and structures we’ve inherited about who we should be, what we should want, and what we must sacrifice to belong.

The world we live in is built on manufactured desire.

We are surrounded by systems—economic, political, social—that depend on keeping our desires confused.

Capitalism thrives when we hunger for what cannot satisfy.
Colonialism thrives when we forget the wisdom of our bodies and the land.
Empire thrives when we trade authentic belonging for shallow approval.

In a world built on noise and mimicry, genuine desire is spiritually disruptive.

Jesus embodied this holy rebellion.
He knew that real longing was the doorway to true transformation.
He didn’t shame longing — he sanctified it.

He sought out the ones whose hunger had not been domesticated by the world: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sick, the poor. They were outcasts and had nothing left to protect, nothing to perform. Beneath the distortions of their lives, their longing remained raw, intact, and holy. Jesus didn’t affirm their false desires—he didn’t say, "Stay as you are." But he also didn’t condemn them for their hunger. He recognized the deeper ache beneath the surface—the longing for healing, for communion, for home—and he called it forth.

He said, Come, follow me. Come hunger for righteousness. Come thirst for living water. He asked them to give up the small, distorted desires they had been trained to chase—wealth, status, survival—and to desire wisely, rightly, deeply. He honored the sacredness of true longing, and he redirected it toward the Kingdom. The doorway was never religious performance. It was always holy hunger.

When we tune into what we truly hunger for—love, presence, sacred work, authentic community—we become harder to control. We stop buying endlessly. We stop striving endlessly. We stop propping up a world built on scarcity and fear.

The world offers us a counterfeit belonging—a manufactured identity that demands we suppress our true desires to stay safe. Empire teaches us to perform for approval, to hunger for accumulation, to mold ourselves into what is useful, productive, and acceptable. Belonging becomes conditional, fragile, and exhausting.

Empire teaches us to hunger for what moth and rust will surely claim: wealth, status, fleeting admiration. The Kingdom teaches us to hunger for what lasts: beauty, goodness, and truth.

In the Kingdom Jesus reveals, belonging is rooted in grace. It requires no performance, only the willingness to be transformed by longing. True belonging arises when we are willing to listen to the ache inside us and follow it beyond the false promises of empire. It asks us to hunger and thirst—not for power, not for status, but for goodness, for truth, for God.

Genuine desire is not selfishness.
It is death to the empire inside us—the empire that wants to keep us small and confused.

When we clarify our desire, we die to the world of almosts.
We die to false belonging.
And in doing so, we make space for the Kingdom to break in.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—for they will be satisfied.

Clarifying desire

Not every desire is clear at first.

Often, longing appears in distorted forms—a compulsive hunger, a restless ache, a craving that seems to promise relief but leaves us emptier still. It’s easy to label these desires as wrong or shallow and try to avoid or suppress them.

But if we stay with it—if we feel the longing without rushing to act, without rushing to shame it—a deeper truth begins to emerge.

Beneath the surface impulse, there is usually a more vulnerable longing trying to speak.

The desire for a new possession might be covering a longing to feel safe or valued.
The ache for admiration might be covering a longing to be truly seen.
The impulse to distract or numb might be covering a longing to belong.

And beneath all these longings, if we listen closely enough, there is an even deeper hunger: the longing to return to a place of real connection, to live inside a world that is sacred and whole.

The surface desires aren’t separate from the sacred. They are the first, rough language of our soul’s hunger for God.

This is why Jesus blesses those who hunger and thirst.

It’s not hunger itself that is the problem.
It’s hunger misdirected—hunger trapped in chasing what can never truly satisfy.
Because true hunger, when honored and trusted, leads us home.

Not every impulse is pure. But desire itself is not the enemy. Surface longing, if listened to deeply, becomes the doorway to true longing. True longing reveals itself by its fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness.

When I trace my own desires down through their layers, I always find the same thing waiting at the root:
a longing to love and be loved,
a longing to belong to something real,
a longing to be gathered back into the grace that holds everything.

Desire, when listened to deeply enough, always leads us home.

Clarity and grief

Admitting clarity doesn’t make life easier—it makes it truer. And truth always comes with a cost. It asks us to let go of everything comfortable, familiar, safe. It is both difficult and easy.

Letting go of my former relationship cracked me open in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. For months, I lived inside that barren ache, grieving the life I had been building, the love I had cherished, the future I had once imagined. I had to let all of that die, and grieve its passing.

To avoid that grief, we learn to settle. To downplay our longing. We stay in jobs, relationships, roles, cultures, and identities that are almost what we want—but not quite—because we’re afraid of the grief that would come from telling the truth. Afraid that naming the real desire would require a death of what’s comfortable —and it would.

To clarify our desires, we must be willing to release what doesn’t match them. We must be willing to stand empty for a moment before the new shape comes. Desire and grief walk hand in hand. One reveals the other.

Just as a seed underground aches for light and sun and rain, our souls long to open into the fullness of who we are meant to be. But like the seed, that longing will destroy us. We must allow ourselves to break—to forget everything we thought we were—and trust that who we are becoming through our longing is more magnificent than what we could have imagined.

This is what is meant by faith.

The still, small voice

Faith asks us to listen when the Holy Spirit speaks —through the quiet whisper of longing.
The ache that won’t go away.
The gentle pull toward what is true.

Desire doesn't shout down from heaven; it roots itself in us like a seed, yearning upward toward light.

When we listen to that voice, that yearning, we differentiate into our unique selves, more able to fulfill our part as individual cells in the body of Christ.
Desire is not selfish—it is sacred.
It is how the collective body becomes more whole.

So yes, desire will ask us to grieve.
Yes, it will ask us to risk.
Yes, it will ask us to let go of almost.

But on the other side of that honesty?
There is a life that is not performative, not safe, but true.
Not perfect, but aligned.
Not controlled, but moved by grace.

This is how we become instruments of God’s will—not by suppressing our desires, but by sanctifying and clarifying them.
By listening. By trusting. By choosing.

First, we clarify the desire.
Then we confess it—on the page, in prayer, to another human soul.
We grieve and release what no longer fits.
And then, we step into the new shape our longing has revealed.
We become instruments God can play.

How do we clarify what we want?

Here are a few practices that help me listen:

• Free-form desire journaling: Sit down and ask, “What do I want?”. Let answers spill out—big things, small things, strange things. I want orange juice. I want a red dress. I want $10,000. I want to be surrounded by loving community. I want a hug. Let go of censorship. For now, don’t worry about whether your desires are good or bad, possible or absurd. The point isn’t to filter—it’s to feel and open the flow of genuine desire.

• Embodied discernment: Inspired by Marie Kondo, this is a surprisingly potent spiritual practice Hold an object in your hands and ask, does this spark joy? Not necessity. Not guilt. Not stories. Joy. Start with objects that feel obviously joyful, then move to more complicated items. Notice how the body signals genuine joy, and what stories try to talk over the deeper answer. Desire has a tone when it’s real. The body knows. Practice trusting it.

• Silence, prayer, fasting, ritual: Genuine desire usually doesn’t shout, it whispers. Stepping into sacred space helps separate from the noise. Listen for the still, small voice—the clear whisper of your inner knowing.

• Somatic safety: Let your body fully feel that you are safe. If you’re in a survival state, you can’t feel safe enough to know what you want. Practices like Somatic Experiencing help create enough safety in the body to feel desire without shutting down. Because desire is vulnerable. It carries the risk of not being met, of having to let go, of everything changing. That’s why the body has to trust it’s safe enough to want.

• Clarifying deeper desire: When a desire arises—especially a restless or compulsive one—pause. Instead of acting on it or judging it, ask: What deeper hunger might this be pointing toward? Beneath this want, what am I truly longing for? If I trusted that my deepest needs are already held, what might this desire become? Let the surface longing lead you—not toward action, but toward listening. Trace the ache down to its source. Often, you’ll find that even restless desires are longing for belonging, safety, love—and ultimately, for God.

Invitation into clarity

Look around your life. Start small — in your closet, your bookshelf, your kitchen.
What are you holding onto out of obligation? What are you justifying? What have you already outgrown?

Then move outward.

Your relationships. Your calendar. Your community. Your body. Your dreams. Your spiritual life.

Where are you settling for almost?
Where are you afraid to admit what you really want?

What if clarity was not a threat, but a gift?
What if desire was not a distraction, but a directive?
What if getting honest is how God gets in?

When we name what we want—not from ego, but from deep, honest listening—we become instruments of something holy. We grow into the shape we were meant to take.

Thy will be done becomes not a surrender to something outside of us, but sacred melody rising from within.

So—what do you really want?

And are you willing to let your longing change everything?