Into The Wilderness

My last few blogs have been really optimistic and upbeat blogs about how awesome this trip has been and how much God has been doing in my life and how I have been growing in such leaps and bounds, and while that is partly true its not the whole truth. This blog is not one I was wanting to write but I think it needs to be written. What I am about to write is gut wrenchingly honest. Its real and it’s me. You see, these past three weeks have been some of the hardest of my time here, which is truly saying a lot when one steps back and looks at all the turmoil and hard ache that went on in July. Early this month God laid it on my heart to give someone up. To place a relationship on hold and remove the distraction that it was causing. I was coming off a month of absolute awesomeness and a month of me feeling super close to God. A month of feeling His grace flow through me and one in which my joy, peace, and trust in Him seemed unending. I was on top of the world and felt like I could do anything, so naturally when He asked me to put the friendship on hold I jumped at it expecting that God was going to supercharge me in the Spirit. If I was already so full of Love, Grace, Peace, and Joy, then how much more so when I gave that friend up and focused solely on Him? Little did I know, that when I asked God to take me to another level, what I was truly asking for.

                August 29^th came and my friend and I talked and discussed the laying down of the friendship so we could both focus on Him. She said that she had been feeling the same and been getting the same message as me so it wasn’t just me feeling this leading. So we stopped talking. One day goes by and no problem, still feeling close to Him and feeling joy and peace. Day 2 comes and again no problem. Day three comes and all of a sudden I notice that, for the first time in over a month, I was actually starting to get frustrated, and not frustrated over big things but of small, insignificant things. Things that don’t matter. I thought it was just an off day and I knew the remedy was worship and prayer so that’s what I did. For an hour I prayed and worshiped and to my shock, nothing changed. I was still getting frustrated and was just feeling weird. I thought it must be a fluke, a bad day. Turns out it was the beginning of something that I was not prepared for. The next three weeks turned into weeks of feeling anger, indifference, loneliness, frustration, and more than anything else, dry. I was spiritually dry. I couldn’t understand it. I was praying every day, reading my bible, worshiping and yet nothing was changing. Sure, there were flashes of joy and peace but they were few and far between. I felt completely alone, isolated in a foreign country. My prayers started turning from “God I know you have everything under control”, to “God what are you doing?” I gave up a friendship to grow closer to God and yet here I was feeling farther from Him then I had in a long time. I asked God why I had to give up the friend if it was going to cause me to get worse. I gave her up for Him and yet I was getting nothing. It has been a very hard and lonely time.

                Today I moved to Kigali and I got to talk to the missionary that has taken me under his wing. I told him all that was going on and his words put everything into context. He said that when Christ was baptized and the Holy Spirit fell upon Him, what was the next thing God had him do? God sent Christ into the wilderness. Into a dry wasteland. Whenever we ask God to take us to the next level spiritually He doesn’t just say “ok here ya go.” He places us in the wilderness to be stretched, strained, and tested. No matter what you do in life, whether in sports or whatever, you get better by training, by pushing yourself to your limits and then breaking those limits. That is what God has been doing to me the past three weeks. I heard that and tears welled up in my eyes. All the pain made sense. All the loneliness seemed to have a purpose. It’s in the wilderness that growth happens because it is in the wilderness where our deepest issues are brought to the light to be dealt with. This has not been an easy journey and there have been more nights than not that I have fallen asleep with knots in my stomach due to the pain in my soul. Even with all that though, I wouldn’t have done it any differently because I know that it is making me stronger in Him, even when I can’t feel it.