“The Desires of Thine Heart” -- By: Evelyn Bence

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 04:2 (Spring 1990)
Article: “The Desires of Thine Heart”
Author: Evelyn Bence


“The Desires of Thine Heart”

Evelyn Bence

Evelyn Bence is a freelance writer and editor living in Arlington Virginia. This article first appeared in the August, 1986 Reformed Journal and is reprinted by permission of the author.

A Meditation For Singles

When a junior in college, I was given a pink Helen Steiner Rice birthday card by a grandmotherly woman who watched me open the envelope and read the rhymed sentiment. The now long-forgotten exact wording was clearly inspired by a portion of Psalm 37 that refers to God giving a heart its desires.

I looked up from the card to thank the giver for her thoughtfulness and saw the word “husband” written, as clear as this type, across her beaming face.

I flushed with embarrassment Desire for a soul-mate was something I felt all too keenly, but something I talked about with only a few close friends. Although I looked for him, the man of my dreams had not ridden—on a horse or in a sports car—over the horizon. For my emotional survival, desire was, then and for several years, something to repress.

Seven years later, I was again taken by surprise at how Psalm 37 slipped into a nonexistent conversation—a married person’s counsel or comfort to me, a single woman approaching thirty.

It was my sister’s wedding. She was much older than I, and her marriage was no cause for tears. I knew that and had intended to celebrate wholeheartedly. Yet I, the maid of honor, sobbed throughout the benediction and the recession. I saw my unidentified heartache to its conclusion in a secluded Sunday school room, and within two minutes of my silent escape from the embryonic receiving line, one of my brothers found me. I said nothing to him; he quoted the promise to me, as if it were the clamp that would close my gaping wound. Again, a married person’s presumption flooded me with embarrassment

Desire. Most single women don’t talk of it because they sense the truth in what Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey stated in A Women of Independent Means: “Nothing frightens people more than undisguised need.” And the intensity of our need tends to frighten even ourselves. Not all the time, surely, but too often when we allow ourselves to be alone, we feel empty, as if some part of us were missing. As a recent book title queries, “Why Do I Feel Like Nothing When I Don’t Have a Man?”

In writing about deprivation in his book Creative Suffering, Paul Tournier says, “I think first of all those unmarried women who have confided in me....They are deprived of physical love, but even more—even if they have a lover—they lack the sharing of the whole...

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