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The Far Side of the Wilderness

Following God, even when you can’t see the way through

To learn something new, take the path today that you took yesterday.

—John Burroughs, naturalist

I realize that in describing my descent into the dark night, I’m not making a great case for the benefits of silence and solitude. After all, who wants to succumb to sobbing and sweating feet as the result of a little quiet time? But the truth is, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, silence and solitude are an absolute necessity if we truly desire to know and understand our true selves and enter into intimate relationship with God. It’s nonnegotiable. You will not come to know your whole self and who you are in God if you do not make a concerted effort to carve out space for silence and solitude in the midst of your everyday life.

Please know that you don’t need to travel to Tuscany to seek out quiet and contemplation. True, it was wonderful to have the opportunity and, frankly, the luxury to immerse myself in beauty and in copious amounts of silence and solitude for ten consecutive days, but it wasn’t the place itself that provoked my hillside revelation. It was the uninterrupted quiet and space, time completely free of distraction and responsibility on the far side of the wilderness that opened the door to God’s invitation.

You’re probably familiar with the story of Moses and the burning bush. It’s a Sunday school staple, and for good reason—God doesn’t speak from a flaming shrub every day, after all. A couple of years ago, though, I noticed something in this story that I’d never seen before, a new-to-me detail I’d never considered, which is this: just prior to spotting the burning bush, Moses, the text tells us, was tending his flock of sheep at “the far side of the wilderness” (Exod. 3:1).

The far side of the wilderness. Those are the six words I’d never before noticed in a story I’d read or listened to a dozen or more times. Maybe in my eagerness to get to the heart of the story I’d always skimmed past the opening sentence. Or maybe I’d never really considered the implications of what being at the far side of the wilderness really means. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that these are some of the most important words in this story. Because here’s the truth: God didn’t just lead Moses into the wilderness; he led Moses to the far side of the wilderness—to the quietest, loneliest, most isolated, most desolate place possible. And it was only in that place, away from the demands and distractions of ordinary life, that God spoke to Moses.

What if that burning bush had been alongside a more traveled path? Would Moses, immersed in the demands and distractions of a typical day, have even noticed a shrub sparking with flames? Would he have ambled over, curious, to take a closer look? Would he have even stopped at all?

We’d like to think so. We’d like to think we, too, would notice something as highly unusual as a burning bush and would stop to investigate such a puzzling and intriguing sight. But let’s recall how many commuters, intent on hustling to their next task, barreled past one of the world’s most renowned classical musicians performing “Ave Maria” on his Stradivarius violin in the middle of an urban metro station. A rare and unusual sight, to say the least. Yet in 43 minutes, 1,070 people strode by Joshua Bell without so much as a second glance.

I’m not saying Joshua Bell is God, mind you, but I do think there are some compelling parallels in these two stories. There were seven people like Moses in the metro station that day—seven people who stopped to bask in a moment of rare beauty, seven people who listened and heard something otherworldly in the notes streaming from Bell’s violin that morning. Most everyone else didn’t even see the musician, or if they did, they were too busy to stop, too busy to listen.

It’s also important that we notice exactly when God spoke to Moses:

Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.” (Exod. 3:2–4, emphasis mine)

God only spoke to Moses once Moses stopped to look. I wonder how many times we miss a sign or a call from God simply because we don’t stop to look and listen. I wonder how often we fail to notice God’s presence simply because we are distracted by the hustle of our everyday lives. I wonder if God is calling us to the far side of the wilderness, so that we, like Moses, will hear God and see God and know that we are on holy ground.

Stand Still and See

The narrow road rose steeply in a series of switchbacks, the cliff plunging off a sheer precipice just beyond the flimsy guardrail. “I don’t feel well,” my son Noah said, his voice quavering from the backseat, his face pinched and gray beneath a sprinkling of freckles. We exited at the nearest pull-off. “Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, like this,” I instructed, demonstrating the relaxation technique as we climbed out of the van and walked slowly up the worn stairs to the overlook. “The fresh air will help,” I added, wrapping my arm around his shoulders.

We peered over the split-rail fence into the canyon, where white water raged thousands of feet below us. “I need to sit,” Noah said, abruptly plunking onto a rotten log that had been shoved to the side of the trail. He looked worse, despite the deep breathing.

We sat for a long time in that spot. Brad and Rowan discovered a colony of carpenter ants beneath a layer of decaying bark. Noah breathed, battling nausea.

I, on the other hand, was agitated. After all, we were vacationing in Yellowstone, which meant we should have been glimpsing grizzly bears, roiling geysers, and sputtering fumaroles—at least something more dramatic than ants cavorting in a rotten log.

Restless and antsy (no pun intended)—How long does it take to recover from a bout of car sickness anyway?—I stood up and meandered down the trail to gaze into the canyon. It was during the second or third of these agitated wanderings that I spotted something moving in the distance, a flash of white against gray rock. It was a mother mountain goat and her two tiny young scrambling along the far side of the canyon—a rare sighting. I could hear the echo of rocks tumbling down the steep cliff as the young goats chased each other in and out of the shadows while their mother snatched mouthfuls of weeds.

Noah still didn’t feel well enough to move, so the four of us watched the goats from our perch. We also spotted a woodpecker, barely visible in a nearby Douglas fir. With his brilliant yellow belly and black-and-white zebra plumage, he was unlike any woodpecker I’d ever seen in Nebraska.

“Stand still and see this great thing the LORD is about to do before your eyes!” the prophet Samuel urged the Israelites (1 Sam. 12:16). That’s just it, of course. God is always doing something great before our eyes; his creation is always bursting into view before us; he is always present with us. But more often than not, we don’t see him, simply because we don’t stop to look—not in the bustling metro station, not in our own backyards, not even when we’re on vacation—perhaps especially when we are on vacation.

That day several years ago when we sat on the edge of the trail in Yellowstone, I watched a steady stream of vacationers pass by and was struck by how little they appeared to notice their surroundings. None of the dozens of people who walked past us spotted the woodpecker, and few stayed long enough at the overlook to notice the agile goats (we pointed them out to those who lingered longer than a few seconds). Most of the tourists simply read the placard, snapped a photo or two of the canyon, and moved on, determined to reach their next destination and cross another Yellowstone highlight off their itineraries. Until the moment we were forced by Noah’s car sickness to sit in one spot, we’d done exactly the same: racing through our vacation, hustling on to the next scenic spot, bent on maximizing our time.

Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, God invites us to the far side of the wilderness to commune with him. Saying yes to that invitation requires a willingness to step away from the noise, distractions, and demands of our daily life, at least for a little while. We needn’t stay on the far side of the wilderness forever; given our many responsibilities, that’s neither practical nor possible for most of us. Nor do we need to travel very far. The far side of my wilderness is a park bench at the edge of a little-traveled path. The far side of your wilderness might be a country dirt road, a winding trail through the forest, a patch of sand at the beach, or a quiet corner in your own backyard. Your far side of the wilderness could even be within the confines of your own home—a special armchair that you retreat to in the early morning hours or late in the evening, after your family has gone to bed. For me, personally, it helps to visit a physical location away from my own home, such as the park bench, because the place itself is a signal to my brain to settle into rest. But for you, the far side of the wilderness may, in fact, exist in the far reaches of your own mind—a place of quietness and solace you visit in meditation or contemplative prayer. As Thomas Merton said, “As soon as man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be—in the country, the monastery, the woods or the city.”1

Many years after Moses first experienced God in the burning bush, he offered some words of advice to his fellow Israelites. Moses was an old man by this point, and, having just been informed by God that he was nearing the end of his life and would not cross the Jordan River to step into the Promised Land alongside his people, he was compelled to preach a final sermon to those who would go on ahead without him. Eugene Peterson notes that this sermon in Deuteronomy (Deut. 1–33) is the longest sermon in the Bible and perhaps the longest sermon ever, and in many ways, it’s what you might expect from a successful leader’s final words: wise, insightful, and firm.

Moses recaps the Israelites’ story from captivity in Egypt through their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and he reminds his people of God’s commands as well as God’s promises. As I read through Deuteronomy recently, though, I couldn’t help but notice how often Moses also repeatedly urges the Israelites to stay alert and watchful. “Pay attention. . . . Just make sure you stay alert. . . . Don’t forget anything of what you’ve seen. . . . Stay vigilant as long as you live” (Deut. 4:5, 9 Message). This is the man whose willingness to stop, look, and notice his surroundings alerted him to the presence of God. Here, in his final words to his people, we see him urging them to keep the same kind of attentiveness and watchfulness, so that they too would be aware of God’s presence in their midst.

Moses’ last words to his people are meant for us as well. Pay attention. Stay alert. Be vigilant. God is here with us, just as he promised. But sometimes we must go to the far side of the wilderness to sense his presence. Sometimes we must stand still in order to see the great things God is doing right before our very eyes.

We Are Not Privy to God’s Plan

Still, it needs to be said here: the wilderness isn’t always all frolicking mountain goats and brightly colored woodpeckers, and answering God’s invitation into the far side of the wilderness doesn’t always lead to a burning bush. Sometimes when we step into the wilderness, all we see ahead is vast emptiness, the unknown, an unmarked path. “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going,” Thomas Merton wrote. “I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for sure where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”2 This is the wilderness experience.

Many years ago, long before our children were born, my husband and I backpacked through a small section of Yellowstone National Park. I’d reluctantly agreed to this adventure, knowing that Old Faithful Inn—or any place with plumbing, for that matter—suited me better. A twenty-five-pound pack and a two-man tent pitched on pine cones was not my idea of vacation. But I had agreed, largely because I was newly married and still very much in the “I’ll do anything for you” stage.

On our first day out, Brad and I hiked through a barren landscape, charred husks of birch and pine standing like totems, the ground prickly with new-growth brush. A rampant forest fire had ravaged that part of the park a few years prior, and the burned landscape was still as stark and desolate as a moonscape.

As morning turned to noon and the sun grew hot, the pack straps began to burn ruts into my shoulders, my fancy hiking boots chafed blisters on my heels, and my hair stuck to the nape of my neck like strands of overcooked spaghetti. Weary of the ugly, sooty landscape, I became crankier with each mile. As we rounded each rise I expected to glimpse our final destination in the distance: a lush valley, a glinting lake, our campsite nestled into the cool shade. Instead, at the crest of each hill I saw only another rise ahead, the hope of shade and rest and refreshing water fading as one false summit gave way to the next.

“I really want to be there now,” I complained mercilessly to Brad. “How much farther? When are we going to see the campsite? Why are there so many hills?”

“This is horrible!” I continued. “This isn’t what I expected at all! It’s too hard! I’m not having fun!”

Every time I read about the Israelites’ wilderness wandering I can’t help but remember that terrible Yellowstone hike. My time in the wilderness was comparatively short (a mere day and a night compared to the Israelites’ forty years), but in those hours, time slowed to a crawl. The journey was longer, the terrain rougher, and the circumstances more challenging than I had anticipated. The trail was neither straight nor flat, I couldn’t see our final destination, and, several miles into the journey, I seriously began to question my husband’s navigational skills. Like the Israelites, I complained bitterly and doubted my leader. All hope of ever reaching the promised land vanished, and I lamented the fact that I had ever left the comfort of the lodge and embarked on the hike in the first place.

During their forty years in the wilderness, the Israelites traveled with God as their guide. During the day, God went ahead of the Israelites in a pillar of cloud, and at night in a pillar of fire to give them light (see Exod. 13:20–22). God never left his people alone, yet at the same time, he also didn’t tell them much about his game plan. In fact, the Bible tells us that at one point, God didn’t lead his people on the shortest, most obvious route, but instead, guided them on a more circuitous path around the desert and toward the Red Sea (see Exod. 13:17–18).

We, as twenty-first-century readers of the Bible, know that God had a very good reason for leading his people along this longer, roundabout route: “For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt’” (Exod. 13:17). The Bible tells us God’s reasoning; but God didn’t tell the Israelites. We can see that in making them travel a greater distance, God was actually protecting the Israelites. He knew they were in a fragile state and couldn’t handle going to war. But the Israelites themselves were not privy to this insider information. They simply followed the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire regardless of whether it led them on a longer, more circuitous route or not. They could not see or understand that God was in fact looking out for their best interests by making them go the longer way.

I never expected that a descent into the dark night of the soul would be a critical part of my spiritual journey toward wholeness. I also didn’t anticipate that descent would take place on a spiritual retreat in one of the most serene, idyllic places I’d ever been. In fact, I had hoped for the opposite: I thought I might achieve some sort of spiritual breakthrough (in retrospect, it was a breakthrough . . . just not the kind I’d imagined). And I certainly never expected that confronting my deepest brokenness would, ironically and paradoxically, bring me to a deeper knowledge of myself and a more authentic connection with God. I never saw any of that coming. When I was in the midst of the descent and the subsequent wilderness wandering that followed, I couldn’t see the way through. I could not see the road ahead, and I could not see God.

We often can’t understand why God appears to make our journey longer or more difficult than it needs to be. We can’t see when or how he is protecting us and loving us in his “no,” or in his “stay,” or in his “walk this longer way.” We are not privy to the big picture. God knows the route that is best for us, but we can’t always see the way ourselves. As my friend Deidra says, “God is always working upstream.” The catch is, it takes a while for the current to carry the results of God’s work to us.

You Must Lose Your Life

As I mentioned earlier, a gardener will usually make the first and most drastic pruning cuts on a tree during autumn, or even, depending on the climate, during the winter, when the tree is in its dormant phase. During these quiet months, the tree is not expending energy to move sugars and water up and down its trunk and out to its branches and leaves, and therefore it can focus on resting and healing from the wounds the gardener inflicts during the pruning process.

Allowing God to cut away the false parts of ourselves is a wounding of sorts. He may be pruning away aspects of ourselves that are unnecessary or even threatening to our true selves, but the cutting stings nonetheless. In the pruning we lose parts of our identities that we’ve long clung to, perhaps even pieces of ourselves with which we’ve identified and which we have long allowed to define us. The fact that these are not the best, most fruitful pieces of ourselves doesn’t mean it won’t hurt to let them go, nor does it mean we won’t be afraid to release them. As our limbs and branches tumble to the ground, we struggle to recognize and redefine the bare, exposed, vulnerable self that remains.

Jesus said to his disciples, “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Matt. 16:25–26). It’s significant that Jesus’ statement is repeated almost verbatim in all three of the synoptic Gospels (see also Mark 8:35–37 and Luke 9:24–25). Pay attention to this, Mark, Matthew, and Luke are saying in unison. Barbara Brown Taylor points out that the Greek word for “life” used in these passages is psyche—meaning the human breath, life, or soul. “While Greek has no word for ‘ego,’ psyche comes close,” Taylor explains. “The salvation of the psyche begins with its own demise.”3

This all sounds good and right when Barbara Brown Taylor says it or when we read it in the Bible, but the truth is, losing your life in order to save it is hard work. Our natural inclination as human beings is to clutch something with all our might. We don’t release easily; we don’t give up easily; we don’t lose easily. It is uncomfortable, often painful work to give up the identity we have so carefully crafted. There is a real sense of loss in the process.

I imagine the Israelites must have felt something similar after their exodus from Egypt. Living under the tyranny of the Egyptians for hundreds of years, their identity as individuals and as a people was undoubtedly shaped by their history as slaves. Emerging free and unfettered from Egypt, they would have had an awful lot to let go of—fear, anger, grief, bitterness—and a lot of personal, emotional, and spiritual rebuilding to do. They would have had a lot to learn about themselves and about God.

This is why, when the going got tough out in the wilderness, the Israelites clamored to return to their former lives of enslavement back in Egypt. As painful and terrible as life was in Egypt, at least it was familiar. At least they recognized themselves there. At least they had an identity they understood there. It’s no wonder God had the Israelites stay in the wilderness for forty years. God’s people needed every bit of that time to lean into the slow, laborious work of healing in order to live into their true identity. In our journey toward uncovering and living into our true selves, we need that time too.

Like the Israelites who were liberated from Egypt only to wander in the wilderness, we, too, enter an in-between time, a quiet period after the hard prune but before the regrowth. Like a tree that has been radically pruned, we have wounded places that are now raw and exposed. We can see more clearly into the center of ourselves, and we may not recognize or even like what is there. We wait for the slow healing, the slow revealing. As Sue Monk Kidd says, “We posture ourselves in ways that allow God to heal, transform and create us.”4 This, too, is the wilderness experience.

Several years ago the bishop of the Nebraska synod of my Lutheran denomination preached at my church, and a few minutes into his sermon on the book of Numbers, he said something I have never forgotten: “The wilderness,” the bishop said, “is the place God’s people stay and wait while God is up to something his people can’t possibly see or even imagine.”

I heard the bishop make that statement about the wilderness three times that Sunday. Because I was participating in the liturgy, I sat through all three worship services, something I’d never done before. And every time I heard the bishop make that declaration about the wilderness, I nodded my head yes. Before I left the sanctuary that day, I jotted his words onto my bulletin and slipped it into my purse. I couldn’t have said why at the time, but I knew they were words I didn’t want to forget.

Five days later my agent called to tell me my publisher had turned down my proposal for a second book. Sales for my first book were weak, and as a result, the publishing house had to let me go. Over the next few weeks, the same proposal was turned down by nearly a dozen more publishers. In a matter of a few short weeks, my professional life tanked. My dream of continuing to write and publish books had come up against a major roadblock, and I was roiling in the throes of depression, resentment, fear, and anger . . . mostly anger. I blamed God for leading me down the publishing road, only to bring me to what looked like a definitive dead end. In short, I found myself deep in what was beginning to feel like an unrelenting wilderness. Turns out, the bishop’s words only sounded good when I wasn’t actually in the wilderness. In reality, there’s not much to like about the concepts “stay and wait” and “can’t see or possibly imagine” when you’re smack in the middle of the wilderness with no clear way out.

One morning, as I was still wrestling through this period of figuring out who I was and what I should do with my life, Brad stopped to talk to me as I sat slumped on the couch. “You know that verse you have posted over the bathroom sink, the one about God’s promise?” he asked. I nodded. I knew the one. It was Hebrews 10:23: “Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise” (NLT). I’d read it over and over, every time I washed my hands, every time I brushed my teeth, every time I touched up my lipstick or applied mascara. I knew the words by heart because I was banking on that promise.

“The thing is, hon,” Brad continued gently, “God’s promise doesn’t necessarily include another book deal.”

I can’t even begin to tell you how angry I was at my husband in that moment—mostly because I knew he was right.

In that moment I realized it was true: God had never promised me another book deal. In fact, he hadn’t promised the first book deal. He didn’t promise that I’d get to spend my whole professional career as an author. He didn’t promise me a particular job, even if it was a job I was passionate about and to which I felt called. The truth is, God doesn’t promise to give us the job we desire, the spouse we yearn for, the baby we so desperately want, or the medical test results we are praying for. He doesn’t promise us wealth, health, success, an easy road, or even happiness. In fact, God doesn’t promise to give us most of what we think we want or even most of what we think we need.

This is hard to accept, especially when you’ve been dropped into the middle of the wilderness, facing the job loss, your spouse’s terminal diagnosis, your daughter’s drug addiction, the infertility, the discouraging PET scan results, the notice of foreclosure. This is hard to accept when the way through is neither straight nor clear. It’s hard to accept when there’s no burning bush, no pillars of cloud or flame. Yet at the same time, God’s promise couldn’t be more straightforward. “I am with you always,” Jesus said, “even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20 NLT). God makes other promises in the Bible—he promises eternal life, for instance (see 1 John 2:25), and a new heart and spirit (see Ezek. 36:26)—but those promises essentially point to the same, foundational promise Jesus made to his disciples and to us, which is this: I will be with you always, no matter what.

It’s no coincidence God had me sit through the bishop’s sermon three times in a single Sunday. I am willful and stubborn and spiritually hard of hearing. God knows I need to hear a message more than once for it to stick. God also knew that five days from that Sunday morning I would find myself in the wilderness and would need a reminder of what I was supposed to do there.

Four years later, I’m still thinking about the bishop’s definition of the wilderness, particularly about those two small but important words: stay and wait. I don’t know about you, but to me stay and wait are two of the least appealing words in the English language, especially when you find yourself in a place where the path is neither straight nor clear and all you want is out. But the truth is, staying and waiting are two of the most fundamental aspects of the journey toward uncovering our true selves. God calls us to stay and wait, and all the while, he is working out something we can’t see or even imagine.

GOING DEEPER

Jesus himself was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness, where he faced physical and spiritual temptation and undoubtedly wrestled with loneliness and isolation during his forty days of solitude (see Luke 4:1–13). The wilderness is a formidable place, and yet, like Jesus and like the Israelites, we are intentionally led there by God to be both refined and sustained. The wilderness is also the place where, distanced from distraction and noise, we hear God speak tenderly to us as he leads us through the dense bramble and out the other side.

Here are some questions to consider for times when the path ahead is unclear:

1. Where is your “far side of the wilderness”—the place you are most able to stand still to experience the presence of God? If you don’t have such a place, can you think of a spot you can retreat to—a bench, a path through the woods, a quiet corner of your house—that’s free of distraction and noise?
2. Have you considered that God could be intentionally leading you to the far side of the wilderness for a particular reason? What might he be yearning for you to see or hear as you stand still?
3. Jesus willingly followed the Holy Spirit into the wilderness. The Israelites willingly followed Moses into the wilderness, but later resisted God’s call to continue the journey through the desert. Who are you in the midst of your wilderness journey—a willing or a resistant follower? If you find yourself resistant, can you identify what you are resisting and why?
4. What have you wanted or expected from God that is not, in fact, something he has promised you?