Dancing in the Desert: Grumble, Grumble, Grumble

I have a bad habit of complaining.  Do you?  From an outdoor temperature that makes my bones quiver to a car in traffic that won’t go the speed limit--I hate to be inconvenienced, and I don't like when things don't suit my tastes.  And if I don't catch myself in time,

Wahhhhh.  

I whine.  Or mope.  Or refuse to make the best out of a situation that is all-too-often not really that bad anyway.  Truth be told, even if the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, it's likely I'd complain about that, too.  I don't want to be cold...but I don't really want to be too hot either.  I long for the lazy days of laying around with nothing to do...but not if I get too bored.

Sometimes we complain just because we want to complain.  It can be so satisfying to our spoiled natures to gripe when the slightest hair of life is out of place, just because we can.

If only the universe could figure out how to please us all the time, why, then we wouldn't have a need to complain!

The desert is no stranger to whining either.  While we don't have any evidence of complaints during Moses' first 40-year stint in the desert (yes, there was more than one!), we have an abundance of examples of it when he was leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.  You know the story--they were thrilled to be led away from Pharaoh's reign in Egypt, only to find that God had allowed Moses to lead them into the middle of nowhere.  No food, no shelter, nothing.  How was this better?  As they saw it, they had traded one set of problems for another!  What were they even going to eat?  They were going to starve out there!

But the Lord God of Provision already had those blueprints ready and rolled out.  He rained bread from the sky every day.  Some even referred to it as "angel bread."  Manna.  It was only enough for the day, and hoarding it would do them no good because God would allow it spoil.  But even "angel bread" got boring.  "We miss the food we had in Egypt!" they'd yell.  It didn't matter that in the middle of nowhere, somehow their bellies were full.  It didn't matter that He'd parted a sea to spare their lives.  It didn't matter that He provided fire every evening so they could travel when it was dark.

The same old boring bread, God?  Every day?  That's it?!  That's the best You've got?!

They didn't just want their needs to be met.  No!  They wanted variety!  Flavor and texture!  We're bored, God!  Give us something else!  This isn't good enough!

Yikes.

I love how Chuck Swindoll refers to these incessant whiners in his study on Moses--he calls them "grumbles."  It's a perfect name, isn't it?  Oh, what a blemish we are to the cause of Christ when we can be but reduced merely to the noise we make.  Grumble.

God meets us in the desert to show us how to survive by depending on Him.  And when He only gives us enough for the moment and no cushion to spare, it's not to frustrate us or to hurt us.  It's to show us how to trust in Him.  Of course, He could have provided a huge pile of goods that would have lasted them their entire trek in the wilderness.  But when He showed up day

after day 

after day 

after day 

and never failed to rain His promises, it not only showed them that He was trustworthy and good, it showed them that He was paying attention.

God pays attention to you.  To every detail of every need you have.  You'll never understand that in a time of plenty.  You'll only really start to absorb that in the middle of nowhere when you feel lost and alone and forgotten, and He still manages to deliver everything right on time.  Not your timing, mind you.  His timing.  Perfect timing.

It's a precious and valuable lesson, and we'll never be able to hear it if we're too busy making noise.  If we're too busy grumbling.

Whatever the flavor, God's provisions are always sweet, but nothing is so sweet as to trust in Him.  So, dig in.  Savor His delicious faithfulness.  Learn to give in to His lead and lean on His promises.

Come.  Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Dancing in the Desert: It's Good to Be Forgotten

Have you ever been forgotten?  I was once, and I'm hoping my big sister won't kill me for tattling on her.  When I was a wee little awkward middle school student, she was turning sixteen and had gotten her first car.  It was her job to take me to and from school, and one afternoon, she piled in her baby blue '91 Camry with a host of her "much cooler" (as if) high school friends and took off out of the parking lot, leaving me standing alone on the drop-off ramp, shouting, "Um, hello?!?!"  It was maybe three minutes before she realized what she'd done and turned around to come get me.  I was livid in the moment but now love to look back on it and tease her about it.

We all forget things, and sometimes we forget people (though maybe not in a parking lot.  I love you, Steph!❤).  It happens because we're human, and frankly, our brains just don't always have the ability to remember all of the things we should.

But what about when we feel like God's forgotten about us?  Those times when He puts us in the car, transports us to the desert, drops us off, and then seems to drive away without a word?  I'm sure Moses had to have felt that way at some point during his four decades of sheep-tending.  He had been positioned for power in Egypt, and there he sat, in charge of nothing but smelly livestock.  We know he had a wife named Zipporah and children, but I imagine that much of his time, the company he kept was but the sand, the burning wind, and the hot sun.  At one point, everyone in the kingdom had known his name, but now, what did the sheep care who he was?  As long as he showed up to give them the food and water they needed, he didn't need to maintain popularity or notoriety.  From the top of the food chain to the bottom of the totem pole, he had fallen.  And though he'd made a huge, hotheaded mistake back in Egypt--hadn't God had his eye on Moses?  Wasn't he supposed to do great things?

Wasn't he worth remembering?

Of course he was worth remembering, and he would eventually be remembered by his people--by the whole world, even centuries later!

But not now.  Not here.  Not in the desert.

That's one of the most glorious and humbling and necessary parts of our times in the desert--to forget and to be forgotten.

Let's break those down.

First, often, His purpose of using the desert is to remove us from the complacencies and the trivialities of our regular routines that have preoccupied us.  He wants us to be isolated from normalcy so that we can forget what doesn't matter, and so that we might remember what is.

When we get caught up in our narrow worlds of self-absorption or our iron-clad itineraries for how we demand our lives must go--we tend to make mistakes.  Sometimes those mistakes are minor, and God is able to whisk us away to the desert before we screw things up too majorly.  And then sometimes, our boo-boos are much greater, and the desert becomes Station One of a character-overhaul boot camp.  But it's often because we've forgotten to bend our knee, forgotten we're not in control, forgotten that He is Lord, that He removes us and says, "Forget all that other stuff.  Remember what's true.  Remember Who I Am."

Forget that money should be the most important thing.  Forget that your world should revolve entirely around your spouse or your children or yourself.  Forget that your job is supposed to signify everything about who you are.  Forget that your way is the best way.

It's good to forget what you never needed to remember in the first place.

Secondly, He uses the desert to make us be a little "forgotten" for a time.  What a load of baloney, we say!  Our whole purpose in life is to be remembered, right?  To make names for ourselves!  To be written in the history books!  To go viral on the internet!  To be celebrities!  To be sensations!

No, the sand of the desert is perfect for putting our feet back where they belong.  How grounding to be reminded of our fleeting influences.  How humbling to be forgotten by the world.

And how good the Father is in the desert that when the world forgets--

He is the One who never forgets us.  Ever.

For as silent as the desert is and as alone as it feels, He never leaves our sides.  And He begs of us: Remember Me.  I am the One Who remembers you.

It's good to be forgotten by the world, friends.  It's the perfect time to get one-on-one with the Creator of your being, the Sovereign Ruler of your circumstances, the Great Designer of the arid desert.

So enjoy the time alone with Him.  Allow yourself to forget, to be forgotten, and to dig in deep with the One Who has brought you here.

Dancing in the Desert: Call Your Troubles "Sam"

If you know me well, you know how much I hate snakes, and it's more than just in the "ew they're creepy and disgusting and God should have left them off His creation list" way.  Suffice it to say, in my world, pink roses are to promises what snakes are to impending doom.  (It's a long story that I plan to share with you someday.)

("The Snake and the Rose" by Ninfa Benoni)

At any rate, you could have certainly colored me intrigued when Brooksie gave me a heads-up that our pastor was going to be preaching on "snakes as a symbol of healing" two Sundays ago.

Snakes?  Healing?  There were too many eye-rolls and oxygen-sucking sighs for such a statement.

But I heard him out (with great anticipation, I should add).

Coincidentally (I see you there, God!), the sermon related a story of Moses in the desert.  It wasn't one I was familiar with--it was a sidebar noting the Israelites' incessant complaining about their circumstances and God's response of sending poisonous snakes to bite them.  God gave Moses a bronzed serpentine scepter upon which anyone bitten could look and not die.

The symbol of what had hurt them, our pastor noted, was what could ultimately heal them, and it even became known as the famous Rod of Asclepius, which you might recognize on signs at pharmacies, hospitals, and any other place of "healing."

I began to ponder the message he drove home--is it possible that our troubles can be a gateway to healing?

From the dawn of time, God has been using that which afflicts us to make us better.  Like chemotherapy, it doesn't make sense--fighting something deadly with something that seems and feels even deadlier.  And when God prescribes a hefty dosage to combat the malignancies of our character, we may watch our former selves waste away.

But sometimes, that's exactly what the desert is for.

To have our troubles, our isolation, our obscurity, our pain kill the ugliness inside--and along with it, whatever is necessary to break us in the process.

It is only then that He can rebuild and heal.

I read an excerpt from Jesus Calling that same day, which coincidentally beckoned us to befriend our troubles because they stimulate goodness.  I laughed out loud and told Brooksie, "Okay then.  I'll just call my troubles 'Sam.'"  But when I said it aloud, I stopped laughing, for I understood.

With as much as our pain or our troubles can dominate our lives at times, they deserve an identity.  But that identity needs to be something we can control.  When we let it run rampant and unhinged, it can feel so gigantic and vicious, and it's a bunch of lies.  So it deserves to be viewed and identified in God's light and truth--as a helper, not as a detriment.  As a medicine, not as a poison.

As a friend, not as a foe.

So name your troubles. Call them "Lionel" or "Rick" or "Sam."  Call them "Ashley" or "Linda."  Do what it takes for you to understand that this desert, this wandering, this season of drought and frustration and mystery doesn't exist to take you down.  It exists to reach down deep and pull the goodness out of you, letting all the rest of it blow away like sand in the wind.

You can be healed, my friend--no matter the means it takes.

Dancing in the Desert: Nothing Is Beneath You

The thought happened upon me while I was folding baby blankets at work a few weeks ago.

It's one of those tasks that no one enjoys doing--one we secretly hope someone else will do when we "forget" but needs to be done nonetheless.  I hadn't even been aware it was on our downtime chore list until recently.

That day, the downtime was there, the warmers emptied of linen, and I couldn't find a good excuse to ignore the glaring necessity of this painfully menial task.  Snagging what felt like hundreds of the duck-graced pieces of fabric, I stacked them high on my desk.  Their hastily-folded corners were awry and messy, and they towered haphazardly like a molten, melted pile of well-worn cloth.  One by one, I pulled them off the stack and folded them into neat, puffy squares.  And though it felt tedious and admittedly far below my qualifications, I felt a godly nudge.

This isn't beneath you.

I thought extensively about that.

Nothing (unless morally compromising) is really "beneath" any of us.

I then repeated the same essence in a different phrasing as another blanket swept through my fingers:

I'm not too good for anything.

If you'd told a young, thriving, princely Moses that he'd be stripped from his royal duties to go tend sheep that didn't even belong to him in the middle of the barren brush of the Midian desert, he might've responded with my initial displeasure of folding blankets.  Maybe he would've told God that that was so far beneath him, he'd need a passport and a month's worth of travel to arrive there.

But God knew it wasn't.  And God knew Moses needed to do something he was "too good for."  He shaped Moses' character for 40 years in the desert until Moses was good at doing something he was too good for (tending sheep), in order to lead him to do something Moses didn't feel he would ever be good enough to do (tending the Israelites).

Read that last sentence again--it's a doozie!  See the irony?  The pattern?

I believe God wants us to do big things for Him.  But I think one of the greatest obstacles to us accomplishing them is our own pride.  We don't want the small responsibilities and to have to work up to the greater ones!  We're ready now!  Not folding blankets--give me something better!  Something more noteworthy!

And yet, I find there are countless examples in Scripture where God does His most intricate preparation of His most effective leaders by having them do something far beneath them.

From dungeon-sitting, to enduring humiliating name-calling, to sheep-sitting--God loves to whittle away the hot air of our pompous beliefs about ourselves so that He can reconstruct a pure and humbled distinction that is far more adept at carrying out His work.

It arrives in the physically abject and everyday tasks--from hauling out the smelly garbage and changing the dirty diapers and folding incessant piles of baby blankets.  It includes fetching cups of coffee for people who don't know your name and may never care what it is.  

It can involve emotionally "degrading" and hair-splitting tasks of giving grace to admitting fault to saying we're sorry.

We're not too good for any of it.  None of it is beneath us.  If we are intent on achieving big things for His kingdom, we can't skip lessons to get there based on the touting of our self-reported, self-important resume.  He knows our hearts, and He knows what we're ready for.

We all start at the bottom somehow.  Greatness begins with the menial.  Greatness begins with the lowly.

Greatness begins with the desert.

So pull up a chair and join me, will you?  After all, these blankets won't fold themselves.