When You Feel You Are in a Spiritual DesertSample

When You Feel You're in the Desert

Being alone in the desert is very lonely. You don't really know where you are – there's just an endless nothingness to all sides. Deserts are without food. In the desert, there is nothing you can build or create with - just sand, dry, useless sand with no shape or structure. And when God sends us into the desert, there's no certainty when it will stop. God doesn't give us a calendar when He sends us to the wilderness and when He will lead us out of it. God does not reveal the end date. Most of all, we initially believe there will be no end date. I think Moses also struggled with this.

Deserts are merciless - hot in the daytime and without shade. They get bitterly cold at night, only to be mercilessly eroded by the sun again tomorrow. The whirlwinds blow until everything is full of sand; you hear and feel it between your teeth.

There's no one you can talk to, no one you can ask for advice, no one who can just put his hand on your shoulder and say a few words of encouragement. Sky mirrors and hallucinations are part of the desert—false hopes, dreams, and visions.

So are some of us in God's desert times.

In the desert, you lose your identity, at least that which is considered identity in the world. You lose your dignity. Your appearance becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter if your hair is combed, your face is washed, or you have makeup on.

What people think of you is unimportant because it's just you and the desert. The wilderness is the same for everyone, regardless of who you are, how strong you are, how gifted you are, how important you are, and what position you hold. The desert brings you relentlessly to the end of yourself. It has the ability to make you lose all courage until despair fills your entire being, and all your prestige, knowledge, wisdom, gifts, and plans lie utterly useless and shrivelled on the desert sands. Until only God remains.

Job understood the magnitude of a spiritual wilderness. With his mind, he understood that God was there, but with his emotions and what was happening around him, he could not "experience" God. All the easy answers were gone, to the point where he wished he'd rather be dead.