Into the wilderness

The break is behind them now. Egypt is on the far side of a sea that has already closed, and ahead lies what Deuteronomy will not dress up: the great and terrible wilderness, fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there is no water. This is the second phase, and it has its own weather. The old life is gone and the new land is not yet given, and in between stretches a country with no roads, where the familiar landmarks have all dropped below the horizon and the new ones have not risen. Bearings are simply lost. The map that worked in Egypt is useless here, and there is no map for here. What makes the wilderness so disorienting is precisely that it is neither the bondage left nor the promise ahead; it is the long, trackless middle. And yet, generations later, the LORD will remember this very stretch of sand with something close to tenderness, recalling how His people once followed Him into a land that was not sown. The wilderness was real. So was the One walking ahead of them in it.

You may be standing in exactly this country: out of the old life, not yet into the new, with every familiar bearing gone and nothing solid risen to replace it. The temptation is to read the disorientation as a verdict. To decide that because you cannot find your footing, you must have lost your faith; that because the old certainties no longer work, something has gone wrong with you. The wilderness says otherwise. Losing your bearings is not the same as losing your way. This is a phase, not a sentence, a country to be crossed and not a confession of failure. The disorientation is honest, and you do not have to pretend it away or rush yourself out of it. But neither is it the end of the story or the proof of abandonment. The same God who led His people into the trackless middle remembered it afterward as the season of their first love. He is not absent from your wilderness. He is the One who led you into it and who intends to lead you through.