The difficulty of the subjunctive

So, I've been working again on Spanish. Having returned from Peru and certain that we will be going back to continue ministry there, I picked up a few books in Spanish (Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, for a start) and have been working on my vocabulary.

One of the things I was reminded of quickly was how much I hated the subjunctive tense. It's a little hard to explain in English because our subjunctive tense is pretty inconsistent, but in Spanish, verbs have different endings when they are indicating something wished, desired, hoped for. For instance, we say, "I wish I were able to fly," and the verb "to be" is in subjunctive tense, "were."

Okay, grammar lesson over. This is of interest me only because I have been reflecting recently on the danger we face in expressing desire. We throw out expressions of hopes, wishes, desires, etc. pretty constantly because we, as humans, can't escape value. We like some situations and conditions better than others and we wish those were reality. And so we express those feelings: "I hope this goes well... I wish I could go home... I want to get some lunch... I'd like to be alone... It's a shame that we couldn't go out tonight."

But we take very little care in articulating these desires, not knowing that we are engaged in a most important activity. We think we are merely expressing a desire, but we are doing so much more than that!

If speaking in the subjunctive - expressing desire - were merely a matter of issuing forth statements of my current mood, that would be one thing. The trouble is, we don't really know our current moods very well at all. We are often the worst judges of our own emotions. (Jer 17:9—the heart is deceitful above all things, who can understand it? Only God.) But we are gifted with a very powerful ability—articulation. We feel a vague sensation of desire, and we set about articulating what it means. That is, we try to pinpoint the object of our desire. But we very often do a poor job; we reach out for something which cannot satisfy us. And when we identify our desire wrongly, we now have it in our heads: this will make me happy.

Take a concrete example. Suppose I feel a desire in my heart and set about expressing it; in the process, I bring to mind an image of people praising me for my athletic ability. (This is clearly a made-up example.) Now, seeing this image in my mind, my heart leaps and I say, "That's it! I want to be a better athlete." (Notice the subtle shift—we don't ordinarily articulate the real reasons we desire things, which are manifestly superficial; the honest statement here would be, "I want people to praise me for being an athlete," but I've shielded myself from that blunt statement of pride.) I have now identified my emotion, and held out a picture in front of me that dangles, like a carrot before a workhorse. Now that the picture lingers there, whenever I feel that emotion I can make quick work of saying, "I want to be an athlete!" I won't feel like I need to explore further, I'll believe I know what I am feeling.

And, most importantly, this vision will now motivate my action. I will take up sports, begin working out, running, taking tips from pros, etc. I will use my time toward the goal of improving myself as an athlete. Because I have articulated my desire, I have a clear goal, a clear direction, and I will pursue it by the means appropriate for that goal. (Or the best means I am aware of; of course we can be foolish, or half-hearted, at this stage.)

Now, this is the point I am driving at: if I articulated my desire badly, then I will pursue a goal which will not satisfy me; the more I pursue it, the harder it will be to question. For each time I feel the desire and articulate it, "Athlete! I'll be an athlete!" I have further engrained into my mind that vision, and it becomes harder and harder to back away and ask, "Really? Is that what I want?"

Perhaps, let's say, my original feeling of desire would have been better articulated, "I would like to be approved of; and, really, it's God's approval I need because He created me." If this articulation matches up with reality more accurately, then to find it will be to move in the right direction, the one which will satisfy, while any other articulation will lead me astray. Notice, if I hold up the latter articulation, envision what it would look like to please God, and pursue that, then my action will be very different. Now, perhaps, I will devote much time to the reading of the Word, to serving the poor and needy, to sharing in the sufferings of Christ.

The danger of articulating desires is this: if we speak our desires to ourselves poorly, then we can set ourselves in precisely the wrong direction. Everytime—everytime!—I say, "I wish... I hope... I want..." I am casting a vision of a way the world could be. But not every way the world could be, would actually satisfy us. There are many, many ways the world could be which would devastate us, but which appear desirable from where we stand.

I have discovered that I am very bad at articulating my desires. My vision is all twisted, which makes sense because this is precisely what the Bible told me would be the case. And so it becomes all the more important to allow God's Word to articulate my desires. It becomes more important to be in the Word so I can recognize when I am fooling myself, and so I can question myself. "Is that really what you want? Because God said that would not be good." In essence, we're to fight in order to choose the opposite of what Adam and Eve chose. They chose to doubt God's articulation, His vision, of what would be good, in order to follow their own. But we have to fight in order to trust God's vision of the good over our own. This just makes sense to me, because my vision is so short-sighted and distorted (I know from experience.)

So, to sum up—I'm pretty glad that I am terrible at the subjunctive in Spanish, because I have to pause and think about what I am going to say. Would that I did that in my own head, as I articulate in English! It would be good for me, for us, to pause before we try to say what it is we want or desire; because once we say the sentence, once we make the statement, we have shaped our vision, we have set our eyes in a direction, and it may be very, very difficult to undo what we have done. It would be better to say what is true from the beginning.