What Do We Do with Unfulfilled Longings?

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Surrendering Unfulfilled Longings"

"Faith in the Face of Infertility" 

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Dannah Gresh: Have I mentioned I like donuts . . . a lot! So much so, in fact, that I don’t have them very often, because I can’t seem to eat just one.

Well, a few weeks ago I needed one. Badly. Not any donut, but a vanilla creme-filled powdered confection. I could almost taste it in my mouth. It needed to be fresh. I knew I didn’t really need it. I brushed it off. “Dannah, do the day!” But I kept thinking about that first bite of a soft, fresh, sweet donut oozing with that . . . well, you get the idea. I had to have it. And so, at 9:30 at night, I drove out of my way after a late night meeting . . . and indulged! 

The donut? Disappointingly stale. Bummer!

I’m your host, Dannah Gresh, and you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Unfulfilled longings—they’re hard, aren’t they? They feel kinda like that craving I described, except they’re so much deeper. Because instead of that ache in your stomach, it’s in your spirit. 

And unlike a craving for food that can be satisfied with a simple run to the grocery store, unfulfilled longings are often out of our control. When we’re desperate for a husband, or a baby, or a restored marriage, or a close friend; well, there’s not a grocery aisle for that.

No matter what your longing for, the ache is real. And you’re not alone.

Amy Baker understands this feeling. She experienced an unexpectedly long season of singleness, but her story is evidence that our desires don’t have to control or consume us. Instead, they can teach us. Amy and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth sat down to talk about wisdom they learned during their single years. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Amy, thank you so much for talking with us this week about what the Word has to say about singleness and also something about your personal pilgrimage in this area.

Amy Baker: Thank you, Nancy, I'm glad to be here.

Nancy: And for those of you who weren't with us the last time we talked, Amy has been married for about a year and a half. You're in your mid-forties. You were single for the first forty something years of your life. God really did a work of grace in your life during those years.

Amy: I'm so thankful that God had plans that were beyond what imagined. His ways are so much higher than our ways and so much better than our ways. I don't have a moment's regret for anything that God did in my life that was not the way I thought I wanted at the time.

Nancy: You know, someone has said that God's will is exactly what I would choose if I knew what God knows.

Amy: Yes, we're so limited by our finiteness. The listener's question that you started with so aptly describes not just the struggle of singles but the struggle of humans in general.

We look at things and we don't see what God is up to. And we begin to wonder: What are you up to, Lord? Throughout the Psalms we hear the Psalmist saying: "Lord, what are you doing? I don't get it."

Let's remind ourselves to wait a minute and acknowledge: I'm know you're up to something good. Psalm 84:11 says that: "The Lord God is a sun and a shield. No good thing will He withhold from those that walk uprightly."

Nancy: Now as you were going through your twenties, thirties and then approaching forty and still no sign of marriage in sight did you ever struggle or strive and ask: "Lord, what about this good thing that You said You wouldn't withhold from me?"

Amy: You know, at that point I don't know that singleness was the kind of struggle it could have been. I'm thankful it wasn't. Our purpose is to bring glory and honor to God.

As I began to get involved in ministering to others and looking for ways that I ought to be growing (God has given so many ministry opportunities in our lives that it doesn't really leave a lot of room for sitting around and focusing on what I might want), I found real joy and satisfaction in getting to minister.

You know, I'm married now but that doesn't mean that now it's about me or what I can get. It's still about ministering. It's still about putting the needs of others first. It's still about striving to please God and love others.

God tells us what we're supposed to be doing. That hasn't changed simply because I've gotten married. I may have a little bit of a different focus in whom I am striving to minister to now. But the fact is that I'm still doing the same thing just in a different setting.

Nancy: And it's interesting, Amy, you and I have both counseled with a lot of women either single or married and we've seen how singles can be self-focused, living in self-pity, wallowing in the frustration or the challenge of being single.

We realize that once they get married, though they may have thought that's what would solve their issues and make them happy, if they go into marriage as a self-focused person, they're really not going to be any happier.

Amy: Exactly. I had a pastor who used to give an illustration of folks who were struggling with something and might move to a new location to have a fresh start.

He pointed out that the same person that gets into the car gets out of it. It's not a change in circumstances that's going to bring satisfaction. It's a change of heart, learning to trust and depend on our God.

Where our thinking doesn't line up with His thinking, guess who needs to change? It's not that God needs to change. It's that we now have an opportunity to align ourselves with Him and show our faith and trust in Him by learning to think His thoughts and learning to think His ways.

In the email you mentioned awhile ago, she mentioned her dreams. That's so true for all of us. Dreams that are not fulfilled give us the opportunity to demonstrate whether our relationship with God is one that is shallow or if there's depth in it. If I see God as just a big cosmic Santa Claus . . .

Nancy: Fulfilling all my dreams.

Amy: Exactly. When my dreams are not fulfilled, there's not going to be joy; there's not going to be contentment. Life is going to be very dissatisfying.

But I need to learn to see God as Habakkuk 3:17 writes: "Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stall."

What he is describing is that there is nothing good or tangible here that I can see. My life looks very, very bleak. But how does he end it? He says: "Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Savior" (Hab. 3:18).

Now you know that he couldn't have made that decision based on His circumstances. At that point, I think it shows depth in relationship with God.

There's nothing that he can see that God is doing that is good from a human standpoint, but yet he says: "I will rejoice in the Lord."

He's making a choice that he's not going to base his evaluation of this on what he can see or experience. He's going to base it on truth. So he says: "I will be joyful in God my Savior."

I think we get opportunities like that when we have dreams and our dreamsnaren't fulfilled. Then we have a wonderful opportunity to say: "Lord, I want there to be depth in my relationship with You.

I don't just want it to be a shallow relationship where I praise You because You have given me everything that I think I wanted. So I'm going give thanks to You and I'm going to praise You because You gave me everything that I wanted. This becomes very easy.

Nancy: We'rereally loving His gifts more than Him and as long as I have those gifts, as long as God keeps stocking us up, then we'll love Him and praise Him.

But what happens once He withholds or He takes it away. Does our love for Him dry up? Well, it says something about the nature of our love for Him, doesn't it?

Amy: Isn't it good that God gives us opportunity to really examine ourselves and see what the case is in our hearts because He does pour out gifts on us.

He's such a good God and blesses us richly. We must determine to love Him for who He is and not for what I can get or my love is indeed a shallow one.

Isn't it good of Him to give us opportunities where we can really examine that and say: "Okay, now I can see that I do love Him" or you know what, "my love was shallow and now I've got an opportunity for there to be some depth, for me to grow in that."

If we simply got what we wanted all the time, we wouldn't know the answer to that question. God would, of course, but we wouldn't.

Nancy: And there's such sanctifying power in unfulfilled longing. It gives us something to offer up to God as a sacrifice. I've been reading recently how God summoned or called for a famine in the land. Deuteronomy 8:3 says: "God caused them to hunger."

There are times in a sense when God deprives us of physical or material or tangible or relational or visual benefits. Why?

So He can make our hearts hungry for Him. If you and I could have here on earth everything we wanted, everything we thought would satisfy us, we wouldn't long for anything more.

We wouldn't long for heaven; we wouldn't long to be filled with that which only God can supply. So there's something about those unfulfilled longings that can press us to His heart and bring us to a place of greater dependence, reliance on Him, confidence in Him.

Someone has said, "You'll never know that Christ is all you need till He is all that you have." When He is all that you have, you will find that He really is all that you need.

Dannah: Wow! Unfulfilled desires are really opportunities to go deeper with the Lord. What a wise perspective from Amy Baker. That’s exactly what the good desire for marriage is—something we can offer up to him. If you’re single and struggling to rest in Jesus, this is a truth to cling to. And you know, this truth doesn’t just apply to singleness. It’s for anyone with an empty ache in their hearts. . . like the ache for a baby. 

Next we’re going to hear from Kristen Clark. She’s an author, speaker, and co-founder of Girl Defined Ministries. Kristen knows what it’s like to long for a baby and feel as though God is silent. Her infertility journey is a powerful testimony to God’s grace in the face of unfulfilled desires. Let’s walk through her story together.

Kristen met her dream man, Zach Clark, at a conference when she was nineteen. He checked all her boxes. He was a humble leader who feared the Lord—and Kristen thought he was pretty cute, too. Several years later, they were married.

Kristen Clark: I remember going on my honeymoon, thinking, Life is too good. This is too easy. I felt like I was living a dream.

Dannah: Kristen and Zach decided not to prevent pregnancy early on in their marriage. One year, then two went by, and no baby. Until . . .

Kristen: I think it was a week or two after our two-year anniversary, I found out I was pregnant. We were so excited. I just thought, Oh, God’s timing is so perfect. It’s all working out just the way He wanted it to. I felt like I was trusting the Lord. Everything was great again—fairy-tale life continuing on.

Then exactly six-and-one-half weeks into the pregnancy, I miscarried. It was so abrupt. I started bleeding, and then a couple hours later, it was all over. I just remember sitting back in shock.

The months tick by, and then exactly six months after that, the day after Christmas, I find out I’m pregnant again. I was doing the research. You know, Google can be your best friend and your worst enemy. I’m researching, and everyone online is saying, “Okay, two consecutive miscarriages are really rare. It’s probably not going to happen again.”

So when I got pregnant again, I had that balance of kind of fearful, like, it might happen again, but then I was really putting my trust in the statistics. And I thought, There’s no way this can happen twice. And so I held it with a little bit of a looser grip. Like, “Lord, I’m surrendering, but it’s probably going to work out okay.”

And then exactly six-and-one-half weeks to the day, I miscarried again.

Dannah: Following her second miscarriage, doctors gave Kristen a devastating diagnosis—unexplained infertility. Then, after six years of silence, she became pregnant again. And this time, things looked like they were going well.

Kristen: And so week five, week six, and then we hit week seven. I’m like, “I’ve never made it past six-and-a-half weeks.” Then we hit week eight. We go and we get an appointment, and we have an ultrasound, “The heartbeat’s strong, everything’s measuring on track.” So I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to download the pregnancy app. I’m still going to surrender this and trust the Lord, but I’m going to try to kind of celebrate what’s happening right now.”

Bethany, my sister, encouraged me. She said, “Just live today. Don’t live in the fear of tomorrow. Just celebrate what God’s doing today.” And that was really helpful for me.

So I got that app. Week nine rolled around. Week ten, and everything seemed like it was going well. And then at eleven weeks, I started bleeding just a little bit. I was like, “I don’t know what this is. This doesn’t seem good. Bleeding’s never good, but it was just spotting. Sometimes that’s not a problem.”

And I just told Zack, “Let’s just go get an ultrasound just to see, just to see that everything’s okay, because my heart just needs to know.” And so we went in, eleven weeks. I’m like, “I’m almost out of my first trimester.” This was just this past May.

The doctor did the ultrasound, and so I’m glancing over, and then she just gets really quiet. I knew something was wrong. And she just looked over at us, and she said, “I’m so sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

Dannah: This news felt like a gut punch, and Kristen entered a tearful time of wrestling in her spirit.

Kristen: We as humans, we always want to ask, “Why?” in those moments. And I was asking, “Why? Why, God?” My husband and I had some really good conversations around that time, and he told me, “We don’t understand all the whys, and even if we had the answer to our why questions, it wouldn’t provide peace. Even if God said, ‘This is exactly what I’m doing,’ would it really provide the peace that our hearts are longing for?”

And then, as he’s holding me, he said, “If we’re honest, what we really want when asking God why is for Him to change our circumstances. That’s what we’re really wanting. We’re saying, ‘Why are You doing this, God? Can You change this? Can You just take this away?’ But we have to trust.”

Dannah: At the time of this recording, Kristen’s circumstances remained the same. And she was honest:

Kristen: I feel weary on this journey. I feel tired so often. I just want to be done. “God, can I have a different road, please?

Dannah: But she was also learning. And God has given her a platform to encourage other women in the truth:

Kristen: Over the past eight years of this journey, I have had many family members get pregnant, many friends. My sister that I love so much found out she was pregnant a week after my miscarriage. And those are hard. You’re balancing celebration and sorrow at the same time. But God is good, and He helps us walk through that.

As I’ve been surrounded by so many wonderful moms and pregnant women, God is helping me to see that I can celebrate with others. As I trust that His plan is good for me, I can celebrate that His plan is good for them, too. He has us all in different seasons. We cannot compare our life story, what God is doing in our life, to someone else. We have to walk in our way faithfully and say, “Thank You, God, for what You’re doing in my life. Thank You, God, for what you’re doing in their life.”

He is good, and He has a unique story for each one of us. Psalm 119:68 reminds us of this. I’ve heard Nancy say this verse so many times, it’s become a theme in my own life.

You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.

That is a promise we can cling to that our God is good.

And then, again, Psalm 138:8:

The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.

Last point: how can we as Christian women find joy and fulfillment in the midst of unfulfilled longing? We can find it by serving God wholeheartedly right now. Right now. Where He has us. Right now in the midst of that unfulfilled longing, when we choose to serve God wholeheartedly.

I think for many of us the struggle, the disappointment becomes so heavy that it can often become a barrier that keeps us from moving forward. It becomes the lens that we view all of life through. And then we forget that God has a plan and purpose for us right now. And then we get distracted, and we forget, “Oh, I could be serving God wholeheartedly right now.”

I saw myself falling into that pit when I would laser in on what I didn’t have—that unfulfilled longing. I laser focused on the fact that I don’t have children. But I was missing what was right in front of me, that God had a plan and purpose and wanted to use me to build His kingdom right now.

As I started to shift my focus to not be on what I didn’t have, but rather on what God had given me, it changed everything. And during that season, that’s when Bethany and I launched Girl Defined Ministries.

I started to see that I could be fruitful as a woman in so many other ways. I could produce life in so many other ways than just physically. I could do that by mentoring younger women. Pouring into younger women, discipling them, pursuing Titus 2. I could see that, “Wow! God can give me spiritual children. I can still be fruitful even if He never gives me children of my own.”

And that was a radical transformation for me. That enabled me to serve God wholeheartedly, right where He had me. It was a huge deal in my life.

Matthew 6:20–21 reminds us, 

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

If we are treasuring that desire so much where it becomes an idol, that’s where our heart’s going to be. And it’s going to be so hard to see what God is trying to do in our lives and how He wants us to serve Him.

But when our hearts are focused on Christ, we’re focusing on building His kingdom, and we’re focused on laying up treasures for God’s kingdom. Then the season we’re in, in the midst of unfulfilled longings, becomes a beautiful thing because we can serve God right there. We can pour our lives into what’s right in front of us.

I think that God wants us to lay our desires, strong, even good desires, at the foot of His altar and offer them as a sacrifice of worship to Him, to say, “God, You are enough. I surrender this desire to You. I entrust it to You. Do with it what You will.”

In closing, I just want to remind all of us that God doesn’t promise us an easy life on this earth. But He does promise us complete and total satisfaction in our relationship with Him. And that is something we can count on. In and out of every season, in and out of every unfulfilled longing, every heartache, we can count on the fact that in Christ we can be 100% satisfied.

I want to encourage you, as I’m encouraging my own heart, don’t allow your unfulfilled longings to consume your life and wreck your joy. That’s what the enemy wants. That’s not what God wants for you. Instead, choose to trust Christ and find joy by humbly submitting to God’s story for your life by trusting that God’s plan for you is good and then by serving God wholeheartedly right now, right where He has you.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we know the One who holds our future. And in Him our hearts can find peace and rest.

As we strive to be women who build God’s kingdom in the midst of our unfulfilled longings, will our hearts echo the words of Psalm 138? “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.”

Dannah: God refined Kristen’s perspective and gave her a flourishing ministry encouraging girls to pursue womanhood that honors Him. But that’s not all he gave her. 

Over the last few years, since Kristen shared that story, God has grown her family in a way that she never expected—through adoption.

While Kristen was learning how to trust God’s plan in the midst of her struggles with infertility, there were two precious little boys living in an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine who were waiting for a family. Today those boys are no longer orphans. They are Kristen’s and Zack’s sons.

That was back in 2021. And then, just this last year, God worked a miracle! Kristen gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. 

I got to watch all of this unfold and rejoice with my friend. I have to tell you, good things are worth waiting for and oh, how Kristen kept trusting God! 

Maybe you’re like Kristen, longing for a child. Maybe you’re aching from the grief of miscarriage or longing for a husband. We carry so many desires in these human hearts of ours, and when they’re left unfulfilled, we ache. Often, the first step toward comfort is acknowledging that ache and putting words to it.

We want to point you to a devotional resource that can help you do that. It’s called A Small Book for the Hurting Heart by Pastor Paul Tautges. Nancy endorsed it, and she said:

How often I have wished for this kind of resource to share with a friend in the throes of grief. These meditations will lift up weary hearts and tear-stained faces and help them find compassion and hope in the face of Christ.

This month, when you make a donation of any amount, we’d like to send you Pastor Tautges’s book to say thank you. All you have to do is visit ReviveOurHearts.com to donate and request A Small Book for the Hurting Heart.

Join us next weekend as we talk about the divine purpose God weaves throughout our experience of suffering. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.