I Dream About Leaving And Then Feel Guilty

There is a small private event that happens in a lot of cars on the way home, and it is followed immediately by a much longer and more painful one.

Picture the woman driving. She has about eleven minutes on a particular stretch of road where nothing is required of her, and in those eleven minutes she imagines a different life.

Not a wild one. She imagines working somewhere smaller. She imagines a job that finishes at four. She imagines a version of herself who is not tired all the time and who has a Saturday.

It is a completely ordinary daydream and it lasts about eleven minutes.

And then she pulls into her own street, and the other thing starts.

She thinks about her son and the money that pays for his therapy. She thinks about her husband, who works harder than she does for less. She thinks about how many people would want the job she has just spent eleven minutes imagining escaping from.

And she prosecutes herself for the whole evening.

That is the actual structure of it. Eleven minutes of ordinary longing, and two or three hours of a woman being cross with herself for having a heart that wants things.

And here is the cruelty of that arrangement. The daydream costs nothing. It changes nothing. Nobody in her house is harmed by it and nobody even knows it happened. The self prosecution afterward is the only part of the whole business that takes anything from anybody, and it takes it from the people she is prosecuting herself on behalf of, because they get a distracted and slightly miserable evening.

What people said out loud in the desert

There is a passage in Numbers where a whole nation says out loud what they miss, and it is startlingly specific.

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick. (Numbers 11:5, King James Version)

Cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.

That is a list of things people missed about a place where they had been slaves. And the point worth noticing is that the Bible records the longing in detail, with the actual items named, rather than summarizing it as ingratitude.

Now, that passage does not end well, and it is important to say why. What went wrong there was not that they missed the food. It was what came with it: a settled rejection of the God who had brought them out, and a demand, and a conclusion that everything since had been a mistake.

The longing was recorded. The conclusion was the problem.

You are permitted to miss something and to want something, and Numbers 11 lists the actual items rather than treating the wanting itself as unspeakable (Numbers 11:5), and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a longing and a verdict for somebody who has been treating them as the same thing.

And that distinction is the whole of this article. She has been treating an eleven minute daydream as though it were a rejection of her family, and it is not. It is a heart doing what a heart does.

You have a heart that wants things and that is not a betrayal of anybody, and Numbers 11:5 preserves a list of missed ordinary things in the text without editing it out (Numbers 11:5), and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a want from an accusation.

Pour it out, including that

There is an instruction in the psalms that covers this exactly, and people usually apply it only to grief.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:8)

Pour out your heart. All of it. Which includes the part that wants a job that finishes at four.

There is no clause in that verse restricting it to acceptable material. A jug does not sort its contents on the way out.

You are invited to bring the wanting rather than to hide it, and Psalm 62 says pour out your heart without attaching a list of permitted contents (Psalm 62:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that possible for somebody who has been editing before she prays.

And there is a line about desire that is often misquoted and is worth reading carefully.

Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. (Psalm 37:4)

People read that as a promise that you get what you want. Read it again. It says He gives the desires. Which can mean He grants them, and can equally mean He is the one who puts them there.

Either way, desire is not treated as contraband in that verse. It is something being handled by God rather than something to be hidden from Him.

You have desires that are being handled rather than smuggled, and Psalm 37 puts the desires of the heart into God's hands in the same sentence (Psalm 37:4), and the Spirit of God is the one who does something with a longing that a woman has only ever prosecuted.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could be misread in two directions.

This is not saying she should leave. Nothing here is a nudge toward the door. The daydream is not a plan and this article is not turning it into one.

It is also not saying that every desire should be acted on. Obviously not. There is a difference between letting a longing be honestly felt and letting it run a life.

And it is not saying she should feel nothing about the tension. There is a real tension. She wants something she cannot have right now, and that is genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

And plainly: if the daydream has become the only thing keeping you going, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a drive home. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in carrying that alone.

You are not being handed permission to walk out, and Psalm 62 offers a place to pour something out rather than a direction to go in (Psalm 62:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a longing without turning it into an instruction.