Ever feel like you’re in the middle of a “wilderness experience”?

Spiritually dry, emotionally empty, and feeling like you are physically wandering from place to place?

I was there this past year…

In fact, today is an anniversary of sorts: I recieved my very first infusion treatment for my Crohn’s disease. Ironically, I am scheduled for another infusion today. The emotion of today is acceptance…the emotion of last year was fear.

It took the wilderness time to get me from fear to acceptance.

Jesus Calling says it so well today:

“You have journeyed up a steep, rugged path in recent days. The way ahead is shrouded in uncertainty. Look neither behind you not before you…Trust that I will equip you fully for whatever waits you on your journey.”

In regards to the Israelites living in the wilderness: the empty wilderness kept them dependent

(we feel needy, don’t we?)

and kept them from being distracted with the normal affairs of caring for land and animals.

(I could barely work let alone be distracted by much more than that)

They were starting over in their relationship with God after being enslaved and oppressed in Egypt.

I hadn’t been oppressed or enslaved when my time of wandering the wilderness began…

But I might have been pretty caught up in the day to day life stuff and the plan for myself I thought me and the Lord had agreed on.

Now, God did not cause my illness…but He did allow it to take root in me and rear up while He stood next to me, holding out His hand for me to take and walk with Him through it.

My wilderness time forced me to think.

It forced me to reevaluate my present and my future.

It forced me to to search my heart and find what desires have been put there by the Lord…and what things were not of Him that was keeping me apart from Him.

I did not have any huge revelations in that time but I did experience something similar to what the Israelites did:

I got to know myself better and who I was in the Lord. I got to know God better because He became the One whom I was most dependent upon.

These are important lessons…

Now to read the book of Numbers…