Desert Song

Have you been through the desert in your journey? If you are new to your journey, get ready for the desert. If you have been on your journey for any length of time, you have been through several or many deserts. Deserts are a normal, necessary, and useful part of your journey; just as winter is an integral season each year.

Between leaving and arriving is the desert. God invites each one of us to do something better and to be someone better. God knows we are not ready and so He takes us through a desert of discipline to get us ready. In the desert, we ask hard questions. In the desert, we learn new things about God: our consciousness of God is enlarged. We get revelation knowledge. Things we believed in and read in The Book, but never experienced happen for us and to us in the desert. Something is built up inside us that was not there before. Forced out of our former comfortableness, we learned to receive comfort from God.

Death and tranquility exist side by side in the desert. Things die and we find simplicity. We learn about worshiping God in a tabernacle. We learn to feed ourselves on bread from heaven. Our lives are striped down to trusting God for everything.

The desert is designed to strengthen our spirit so that when we come out of the desert, we live more from our spirits.

Those who get it about the benefits of the desert cheer when their desert time comes. To them, it means more time alone with God or time trusting God to build up their inner spirits. Those who have grown from the desert experiences, carry it with them and have learned to retreat into a mini desert to come before God when their lives are busy and demanding. Jesus did this when he left camp to go up in the hills to seek the Father, when it was still dark, and the disciples were sleeping.

In the book of Hosea there is a beautiful word from God to Israel that may apply to his people today:

Therefore, I will charm her,
and bring her into the desert,
and speak tenderly to her heart.
From there I will give her vineyards,
and make the Achor Valley
a door of hope.
There she will respond to me
as in the days of her youth,
like the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
-Hosea 2:14-15 (CEB)