In chapel on Monday, we had a speaker come. Her name is Marian Jordon, she is a motivational speaker and writer of two books. The one that she talked about was "Wilderness Skills For Women-Dealing with heartbreak and other full blown meltdowns" In chapel, she shared her story of heartbreak, and being led into the wilderness. Let's just say, that her words were powerful, and I know they impacted many other girls in chapel that day other than me. I'm not a crier, but her words spoke to my heart and and I did shed a few tears. It was nice to know, that other people had been through what I had been through, that I devote follower, a motivational speaker had experienced heartbreak and the drought of being in the wilderness.
I don't know about you, but whenever I hear the word "wilderness," I think of mountains, and trees and maybe a creek running through the pretty trees and flowers dancing on the banks eventually ending up at a beautiful waterfall. I never took the time to think about the wilderness that Jesus was led to. The desert. For some reason, the words "wilderness" and "desert" did not go together in my mind. Then in my theology class, our professor put on a video. In the video, it explained how Jesus being led into the wilderness, was Jesus being led into a time of trials, doubt and drought from normal everyday things that make it possible to survive. I thought about this, and what Marian had said about her time in the wilderness, where she felt far away from God and in a drought of love, joy and every other emotion that makes one want to keep going, and constantly pursued by Satan asking her "Where is you God now?" and "How much do you love Him now?"
I went for a drive this weekend. On Friday, I left to visit my uncle in Arizona. It is a five hour drive through the desert. If any of you reading this, know me you also know that I have experienced my own battle with the wilderness the last several months. As I was driving, I decided to do what my theology professor had challenged us, to sit in silence with God and let Him speak to us. Since I had nothing better to do while driving through the desert, I tried it. Nothing happened....I got really frustrated. I started looking around at the ugly desert outside of my car. It was desolate and flat and ugly, and about half-way through my drive, I actually thought of turning around and driving back to school. I started asking God "why would you create something like this? There is nothing beautiful about this..." But then I was reminded of the fact that God doesn't create or do anything without a purpose, and He sees it as beautiful, and maybe I should try and find the beauty also. And I did. In the midst of all the flat ugliness, arose beautiful rock formations and mountains.
It wasn't until I reached my destination, that I realized that in the five hour drive I had witnessed a tangible and visual view of the wilderness I had been led through in the past few months. I drove through the desert mountain on a windy road that left me scared and shaking, much like I felt emotionally after losing some people and relationships very close to my heart. I got to the desert, where there was nothing around me for miles and miles in either direction except the road I was on, and the road that I could take to go back from where I started. It paralleled with how I felt after spring break, where I almost packed up and went home half-way through the semester, too afraid to see what was next. Eventually I got to my destination where I experienced the love and happiness of a family member I hadn't seen in years. God had taken through the desert and led me out, but more than that, there had been beauty in the midst of the wilderness that I never expected to find.
