What are the words that God offers to us in the hard place? What are the ways in which God speaking to our hearts in the wilderness?
There are many, but here is one—When you find yourself hungry and thirsty for the life you used to know, trust that what God gives you is better. The Israelites’ wilderness experience concerns actual hunger and thirst. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” they cry (Exod. 17:3). They accuse: “For you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exod. 16:3). They are actually hungry and actually thirsty, but their physical hunger and thirst symbolizes a larger reality—they have left everything that they know to journey into an uncertain future.
As a 21st century city-dweller living a settled life, it’s hard for me to imagine what it meant to live in the wilderness. The basic distinguishing feature of desert is its barrenness. A large group of people, inhabiting a space like wilderness or desert, always on the move, would have limited their belongings. They would have constantly searched for water and feared death. In the Exodus story, the Pharaoh hints to the likelihood of the Israelite’s death in the wilderness when he thinks that the “wilderness has shut them in” (Exod. 14:3). This is a fierce landscape, a hard place that is unimaginable to me as a 21st century city-dweller.
What is imaginable to me, however, is that spiritual wilderness is also a fearful place that is every bit as dangerous. Spiritual wilderness is also a fierce landscape, a hard place.
It’s a hard place because it’s a barren place for us, too. In 2010, I moved from Alabama to New Jersey to begin doctoral work. It was 17 hours by car away from anything and anyone that I knew. I went as a 27-year-old single woman into a place that was totally new, where I left behind a rich personal life with people I had loved for nearly 20 years. It was, at the time, the scariest thing I had ever done. I went with certainty that God had called me there, but every moment of it was hard. I drove home to Alabama on breaks, and on more than one occasion on that long drive back to New Jersey, I crossed back into that wilderness in tears.
On the surface, God led me to New Jersey to continue my education, but I learned far more about the provision that God provides in barren places than I ever did about my subject of study. However, it’s only in looking back on it that I’m able to see that. We can only really see our lives in reverse. At the time, I sounded a lot like the Israelites—hungry and thirsty for the life I used to know.
Hunger and thirst for a life we used to know acknowledges that some kind of “leave-taking” has taken place. The Quakers speak about leave-taking, closed doors, wilderness wandering as “Way Closing.” We have left—or are in the process of leaving—the life that has been our life—and we find ourselves in wilderness, an in-between space away from the taskmasters and their loud, oppressive voices, but not quite to the better place God is bringing us to. And so we find ourselves here…wherever “here” is. Wilderness is a place that is thick and dark and unmarked, where we don’t know our way. All the markers of the life we used to know are gone. Way has closed.
For the Israelites, God closed the way for his own liberating purpose, yet they still longed for Egypt. I don’t think we’re so different. Isn’t it a strange thing to know that the “Way” has closed—closed because it needed to—yet we long for it anyway? Isn’t it a strange thing to know the life we had before wasn’t liberating, or good, or what God wanted for us, but to want it anyway? We look around and see nothing but the wilderness shutting us in. Instead of seeing the wilderness as the place that closes in on us when “Way” has closed, the Bible teaches that wilderness is the place where God opens our eyes to see his provision. In the wilderness, yes, Way closes. But in the wilderness, the rest of the world also opens up. The wilderness is the place God uses to “open” the Way, if we trust his provision.
In the wilderness, God says, “I know that your old life has died, but trust that what I give you is better.” The provision of God is always better than anything we could envision or procure for ourselves.