Disorientation: the wilderness
Job searches every direction
In the rubble of his losses, Job does the most human thing: he looks for God. He looks east — nothing. West — he cannot find him. North, south; he works and turns and Job cannot catch a single glimpse of him. The God who once felt so near has gone behind a wall, and Job is left in the worst part of any upheaval: the part after the break, before the new, when the old map of God no longer works and no new one has been drawn.
This is disorientation — the wilderness, the formless middle, the place where the question Phyllis Tickle says every upheaval forces to the surface becomes a personal cry: where now is the authority? What do I trust, when the thing I trusted has cracked? And yet, having searched every empty direction, Job says one defiant, load-bearing thing: but he knows the way that I take. He cannot find God. He has decided that God can still find him.
“If I go east, he is not there; if west, I can't find him; he works to the north, but I can't see him; he turns south, but I can't catch a glimpse of him.”
— Job — Job 23:8-9 (WEB)
“But he knows the way that I take. When he has tried me, I shall come forth like gold.”
This is Disorientation — bearings lost, the old certainties cracked, God seemingly absent, the authority question wide open. What it asks of us: to stay, to not bolt back to Egypt or fake a premature certainty, and to trust the God we cannot presently feel.
This is the phase of doubt, deconstruction, grief, the dark night — the longest and most dangerous stretch, because it feels exactly like abandonment. The exodus is over but the land has not appeared; you are in the neutral zone, and every instinct screams that you are simply lost. So you will be tempted to do the two things that wreck people here: bolt back to a familiar bondage rather than endure the uncertainty, or manufacture a brittle, premature certainty just to make the disorientation stop. Resist both. Do not mistake God's silence for God's absence; the two feel identical and are not the same. You may not be able to find Him from inside the fog.
That is not the same as His losing track of you, for He has not, not for a second.
The grace of this phase is hidden, and it is this: God is not lost merely because you cannot find Him. He knows the way you take even when you have lost the map. The wilderness is not God's absence; it is God's furnace, and the gold does not come forth in spite of the fire but because of it. Do not waste your wilderness trying to escape it. Let it try you, and you will come forth like gold.
The Church in our age is living through a long disorientation — bearings lost, inherited certainties cracked, the old answers to where now is the authority no longer settling the argument. Phyllis Tickle named that question, paraphrased here and credited rather than quoted, as the one every great upheaval forces up out of the basement. Whole traditions feel stranded between a Christendom that has died and a future not yet born. The temptation across the Body is exactly the soul's: bolt back to a nostalgic, idealized past, or force a false and brittle certainty to end the discomfort. But the wilderness is doing necessary work in the Church, and rushing it ruins the gold the fire is meant to bring forth.
The God who knows the way you take. You may lose every bearing; you do not fall off His map. What cannot be shaken in the wilderness is that the One you cannot find has never once failed to find you.
- Where am I tempted to bolt back to a familiar bondage rather than endure the uncertainty?
- Am I trying to manufacture a premature certainty just to make the disorientation stop?
- Can I rest in this: I cannot find Him, but He knows the way that I take?
Lord, I have looked in every direction and cannot find You, and the silence frightens me. Hold me in the wilderness when I want to run. Let the fire do its work, and bring me forth like gold — and until then, let it be enough that You know the way that I take. Amen.