Desire without Apology

Reclaiming the sacred permission to want and to rest.

(Part of my Wednesday series: Healing from Fundamentalism)
I’m still writing this e-book with you, right here in real time. Each Wednesday, I share a new piece of this ongoing work on healing from fundamentalism — chapter by chapter, practice by practice. My hope is that these reflections don’t just live on the page, but become companions for your own journey of reclaiming safety, voice, and sacred worth.

My Story

I still remember the morning — a Friday, my day off — when I stopped by the gym.
It was mid-morning, that in-between hour when most people are at work and the gym is empty enough to do whatever you want. I’d just started working at my first church, still in my early twenties, still figuring out how ministry and identity and belonging fit together.

I was halfway through a run when I saw someone from the congregation walk in.
We exchanged small talk — polite, surface level — and then came the look.
That subtle tilt of the head. That half-smile that isn’t really a smile. “Must be nice,” they said, glancing at the treadmill screen. “Some of us are working today.”

I laughed it off. You learn to do that quickly in ministry — to make the moment small so no one sees how much it stings. But something in me tightened. My shoulders, my stomach, my jaw. It felt like being caught doing something wrong, even though I wasn’t.

I knew Friday was my day off. I knew I worked twelve-hour days, late nights, weekends that bled into Mondays. But still — one offhand comment, and suddenly I was standing under a floodlight of judgment.

I didn’t realize it then, but a seed was planted that day — the belief that desire, even for rest, even for care, was something I had to hide.

Over time, that seed took root. Fridays stopped feeling like rest; they became quiet negotiations with guilt. I’d sit on the edge of my bed, debating whether I’d “earned” a day off. I’d say no to lunch with friends because I worried someone might see me out and wonder why I wasn’t “doing ministry.” Desire came with conditions. Rest had to be justified. Joy had to be scheduled around other people’s expectations.

And the cost was slow, invisible, and devastating.

There were seasons when I couldn’t turn it off — the drive to be seen as tireless, available, holy enough. I said yes when my body begged for no. I carried the constant hum of “prove yourself” until it became my pulse. Eventually that hum became exhaustion. Then illness. I landed in the hospital more than once, dehydrated, burned out, the kind of tired that seeps into your bones and rewrites your definition of possible.

My marriage suffered, too. When you forget how to rest, you start resenting those who remind you you’re human. You start calling love “distraction.” You start equating depletion with devotion.

That one small moment in the gym became the script I lived by: don’t stop, don’t want, don’t need.

It took years to realize what that moment really was — control. And here’s the hardest truth I had to face: once shame has taught you to distrust your joy, you start asking permission to be human.

Learning to stop asking — that’s where the healing began.

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Chapter 6: Reclaiming Desire and Delight

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it… what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
— Howard Thurman

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Centering (2 minutes)

Soften your gaze.
Inhale welcome, exhale worry.
Place a hand on your heart and say quietly,

“Desire is a signal; delight is a blessing.”

Let those words meet whatever rises in you — resistance, relief, or maybe both.
There is nothing to fix here. Just listen.

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Personal Check-In

You might begin with:

• “I notice…” (flatness, spark, restlessness, longing)

• “I need…” (beauty, play, rest, touch-with-consent, creativity)

• “I give myself permission to…” (enjoy, taste, dance, nap, try)

Let these phrases be doorways back into yourself. You don’t have to earn delight — you only have to stop apologizing for wanting it.

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Shadow Side Exploration: Suppression and the Underground Return

When desire isn’t safe, we bury it.
We learn early that longing draws attention — and attention draws judgment.
So, we call it self-control or sacrifice, and convince ourselves we’re being faithful.
But buried longing doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground.

There, in the quiet places beneath our awareness, it reshapes itself into other forms:
resentment, overwork, addiction, or apathy. The body keeps trying to feel alive, even when the soul has been told it’s safer not to.

Some of us stay constantly busy, afraid of what might surface in the silence.
Some of us numb out — scrolling, working, serving — anything to avoid that ache of wanting something more. We confuse exhaustion with holiness and mistake burnout for devotion.

This kind of self-erasure often gets rewarded.
Religious systems praise the ones who give until they disappear.
Workplaces promote the ones who never stop producing.
Even families applaud the ones who “don’t need much.”

But that isn’t virtue. It’s conditioning.
And the cost is steep: a slow death of joy, of creativity, of connection.

When desire is treated as dangerous, the soul learns to survive without air.
It builds walls instead of windows. It forgets how to breathe.

That’s why Jesus’ words still cut through the noise:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

The thief is whatever teaches us to trade abundance for approval.
Whatever tells us that feeling alive is a liability.
Whatever convinces us that joy must be earned, and rest must be explained.

That’s how people of faith end up empty. We work ourselves to exhaustion in the name of goodness, all while the life we were promised — the abundant, embodied, joy-soaked kind — slips quietly away.

But holiness was never about erasing our humanity. It was always about integrating it. Holiness is wholeness — desire held with wisdom, consent, and care.

It’s knowing the difference between what depletes and what delights,
between craving escape and craving connection,
between what numbs us and what nourishes us.

When small pleasures begin to return — a walk without your phone, music turned up loud, a meal eaten slowly instead of between tasks — they can feel almost scandalous.
That’s what recovery feels like when you’ve been taught to fear joy.

Each small permission softens what shame has hardened.
Each moment of delight reminds us that pleasure isn’t the enemy of faith — it’s one of its expressions.

Delight isn’t dangerous.
It’s how the soul exhales.
It’s how we remember that the goal was never to survive our lives, but to live them — fully, freely, abundantly.

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Reimagining Scripture: The Wedding at Cana

“On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ … Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ … When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from … the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first … but you have kept the good wine until now.’”
— John 2:1–10

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Jesus’ first miracle didn’t happen in a synagogue or on a mountain.
It happened at a party.

A wedding, to be exact — in the small village of Cana. It was a massive celebration, the kind that stretched on for days. Families and friends packed shoulder to shoulder, laughter spilling into the night, the scent of bread and roasted meat in the air.
The music was loud, the dancing was contagious, and the wine — the symbol of joy, of covenant, of celebration — was flowing freely.

And then, it wasn’t.

Somewhere between the toasts and the laughter, someone realized the wine had run out. The pitchers were empty. The laughter faltered. The host family, who had poured everything into this feast, suddenly faced public humiliation. In that culture, running out of wine wasn’t just an inconvenience — it was a deep social failure, a shame that could linger for years. The celebration was about to end too soon.

And Jesus — standing in the middle of it all — saw what was happening.

He didn’t seize the moment to preach about planning better.
He didn’t take the stage to moralize about moderation.
He didn’t offer a sermon about restraint.

He did something far more disruptive.
He made more wine.

Not just any wine — but the best wine.
Not a polite refill, but an outrageous abundance.
Six stone jars, each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Roughly 150 gallons of joy.

Jesus didn’t stop the party — he cranked it up to eleven.

This is the first sign of God’s glory John tells us about. Not a moment of austerity or judgment. Not divine control on display. But overflow.

The first miracle was about keeping joy alive.
About honoring the celebration, the humanity, the laughter that holds communities together.

At Cana, holiness didn’t look like restraint.
It looked like rejoicing.
It looked like a God who wouldn’t let shame have the last word.

That’s what the kingdom of God looks like — not scarcity, but surplus.
Not rationing joy, but restoring it.

Jesus shows us that celebration isn’t a distraction from holiness; it’s one of the ways holiness shows up among us. The God revealed in Jesus doesn’t scold delight — he blesses it. He doesn’t ration joy — he multiplies it. He doesn’t ask us to earn permission to be human — he fills the jars and passes the cups.

Heaven’s first miracle was making sure no one’s glass ran dry.

Maybe that’s what we’re still learning — that joy isn’t proof you’ve forgotten your suffering. It’s proof you’ve survived it.

The God who kept the wine flowing at Cana is still the God who delights when you rest, who smiles when you play, who meets you not in your restraint but in your aliveness.

And maybe that’s the invitation of this story:
To stop seeing delight as something to apologize for,
and start seeing it as evidence that the divine still lives among us —
turning water into wine, and duty into dance.

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What It Looks Like Now: Reclaiming Desire and Delight

Healing isn’t a one-time permission slip — it’s a practice.
It’s the slow, daily remembering that your humanity was never the problem.

There are still moments when I think back to that younger version of myself — tense, apologetic, shrinking under someone else’s gaze. The one who went home that day from the gym and replayed it again and again, wondering if maybe they were right.
If maybe faithfulness did mean exhaustion. If maybe joy really did have to wait until Saturday.

But it doesn’t anymore.

Now, if I need rest on a Tuesday morning, I take it.
If I need to move my body on a Thursday at ten a.m., I do — without apology, without explanation.

I know the level and amount of work I do.
And I’ve stopped letting guilt be my supervisor.

That’s what reclaiming desire looks like in real life. It’s not indulgence — it’s integrity. It’s learning to trust the wisdom of your body again, to believe that God meets you just as much in laughter as in lament. It’s remembering that joy is not the opposite of responsibility. It’s what makes responsibility sustainable.

Reclaiming desire hasn’t made me reckless; it’s made me honest.
It’s helped me trade the performance of holiness for the practice of wholeness.
It’s learning that rest doesn’t have to be earned, and joy doesn’t need to be justified.

Some days, that honesty looks ordinary:
a long walk without a podcast,
an unhurried meal that no one else sees,
turning off your phone before bed because you’re allowed to rest, not just collapse.

But make no mistake — these are not small things.
They are quiet acts of rebellion against a world that wants to keep you running on empty.

Because the world (and more often than not, religion) has trained us to think that endless productivity is virtue — that fatigue is faithfulness. But the way of Jesus invites us back to abundance, back to the rhythms of breath and being, back to the table where everyone gets enough — including you.

Desire, when healed, stops being something to chase or hide. It becomes something to steward — a rhythm between longing and fulfillment, work and rest, giving and receiving. It’s no longer a fire that burns you; it’s a warmth that sustains you.

Delight, when reclaimed, becomes a signpost of grace. It tells you you’re living in alignment, not avoidance and reminds you that the God who turned water into wine is still turning exhaustion into joy — still blessing the moments when you dare to live as if wholeness is holy.

You don’t have to wait until you feel fully healed to start practicing this.
You can begin now — awkwardly, imperfectly, tenderly.
You can begin by saying yes to one small joy,
by refusing to apologize for being human,
by letting your life — even in its ordinariness — become a quiet celebration of divine delight.

Because maybe salvation was never about escaping life,
but about finally learning how to live it.

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Reflection Questions

1. When was the last time you felt joy without apologizing for it? What made that moment possible?

2. How do you know the difference between a desire that drains you and one that brings you to life?

3. What guilt or script still tries to convince you that rest, play, or pleasure must be earned?

4. What might reclaiming delight look like for you this week — in your body, your schedule, or your spirit?

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Closing / Benediction

May the voice of guilt grow quiet.
May the voice of desire grow kind.

May you trust the rhythm of your own body —
the pauses, the laughter, the long exhales that remind you:
you were never meant to live on empty.

May you rest without apology.
May you delight without defense.
And may you remember —
the God who turned water into wine
still turns exhaustion into joy,
and calls that holy.

Amen. And so it is.