Articles
Conquering Our Personal Wilderness
Surely all of us have had times of “wandering in the wilderness,” those seasons of life where our spirituality has waned, our fervor cooled, our relationship with God on the back burner. We haven’t abandoned God altogether, but we are discouraged, distracted or disenchanted to the point that we just go through the motions. Feelings of guilt for our weakness further drives a wedge between us and God. We don’t feel worthy to pray or seek His help because of our assumption that since we are displeasing to ourselves, surely we must be to God as well. Thus the vicious cycle continues: weakness breeds weakness.
I recently had a conversation with a young lady who had been in her own personal wilderness late in her high school career. She shared the following insightful thoughts that will perhaps benefit others:
“I remember being depressed for months because I felt like I had no friends. I felt isolated; I felt worthless, and every time I wanted to reach out to God I felt ashamed because of how many months I had been ignoring Him. Attending services often felt like ‘going through the motions’ … [I realized] how life without Christ would be, and I never for a second thought that it would be better than living a Christian life. The sole fact that I held on to that belief is what got me through …
“I think the main difference between my situation and many others is that I never lost sight of God and that this world is not my home. I never doubted anything that was written in the Bible. I guess you could say that my struggle was more of an emotional one that significantly impacted my spiritual health.”
Life is full of emotional stresses, from the angst of teenage years to the midlife career pressures to aging decline; from rearing children to caring for our dependent parents; from shielding our children from a decadent culture to helping the spiritually weak. And as our young sister noted, these stresses can easily spill over into our relationship with God.
It may be that we initially take our relationship with God for granted because we feel strong enough to handle things on our own. Or perhaps we feel so besieged by life that we simply neglect to focus on the one relationship that gives us strength to handle all the other stuff. The end result is the same: we gradually weaken, turn inward, focus on the negatives and throw ourselves a pity party. This further cuts us off from God and others, and thus the vicious cycle has begun. We are plagued with cognitive dissonance as we know what we ought to be doing or what is important but we have temporarily set aside our duty to God.
So, when we realize that we keep passing the same sand dunes, or we are thirsty but refuse to stop at the next oasis, what can we do to escape the wilderness? Our insightful young lady continues her self-analysis:
“Throughout my senior year I would have moments where I would try to read my Bible and pray again, but it would only last for one week maximum, and then I would lose endurance. The big turning point was when I took a combination of these things and put them into action:
P I knew that life without Christ was meaningless; nothing in the world would ever fill the void that I was feeling.
P I knew that no sin or time apart from God would be able to separate me from Him if I started living faithfully.
P I knew that the reason why I had not been able to keep my endurance was because I was distracted by things of the world that I used to avoid emotions: TV shows, social media, etc. And those things were meaningless at the end of the day.
P Instead of focusing on the negative, I started seeing all the blessings in my life – like how with God, I can never be lonely, that He has blessed me with a spiritual family on earth!
P I started reading my Bible every day and praying again and, even when I wanted to quit, I kept going, and now it is willingly part of my daily routine. Now if I go a day without reading my Bible, I feel the effects of it and it makes me want to read even more.”
At some point, we simply need to exercise our will and draw a line in the sand of our personal wilderness. We are creatures of habit, not just in behavior but thought. We rationalize, justify and excuse ourselves into remaining weak and aimless. But deep down inside we know we are not giving God our best – as we recently studied from Malachi regarding offering inferior, diseased and damaged sacrifices. If our faith has any spark of life left, we must accept that remaining in the desert is not worth the misery it produces. We have to banish our numbness, push past our inertia and choose to do what we know is right. And if we can’t, perhaps our faith isn’t what we think it is.
Our young sister concludes with these sobering observations: “Everyone is different. My ‘solution’ is probably not going to help a lot of people because you have to want it for yourself. Unfortunately, I can’t give you the key for helping someone spiritually return from darkness because I could never imagine a life without Christ, even in the darkest hours. Others can, and they’ve already started to walk away.
“Now that I’ve come through to the other side and see with a newfound clarity, I feel so deeply for my brothers and sisters who may be struggling spiritually … I always try to say a prayer for my brothers and sisters who are silently struggling. I am in a good place now, but could I have benefitted from prayers of the church … if only I had come forward? Absolutely. I’m guessing that no one would have known what I was going through … because I put up a façade.
“Who knows how many [fellow Christians] are going through the same thing? Only God knows. What an awesome God we serve that, through thick and thin, He is always there, waiting for us to run back to Him.”
Amen, sister.
