Dreaming in the Wilderness

            I firmly believe that some of the most difficult growing times in our lives are those spent in the wilderness, the seasons in our lives in which we are stripped bare of everything but necessity and called to focus upon the conditions of our aching hearts and step back from the current surroundings in which we find our lives planted far too firmly in. During the seasons we spend in the wilderness it becomes just that: our desert; the point when we find ourselves without anything but the faith in our hearts and the unquenchable desire to find paradise once again. In the desert we are stripped of all our pleasures and wants, left only with our longing pleas for the rains to come once again and to wash the dirt from our weary backs and eyes.

 

            The desert breaks us of all of the things we do not need. The wilderness forces us to focus upon our chaotic lives and how far we tend to walk away from all that we truly needed in the first place, while running to what we once believed was paradise. Yet, we far too often run to the paradises of the world, the pleasurable destinations that rest only in darkness but are clothed in a false light of deception and false hope; the paradise in which we can fill our lives with so much false pleasure and still walk away so empty and unfulfilled.

 

 

I still wake in the desert, longing for the sea.

Yet, everyday in the desert is somehow still beautiful.

I’m breaking.

I’m purifying.

I’m discovering.

I’m dreaming.

 

For far too long I have chased after a false paradise, the seemingly perfect moment in time where all the pieces of my life fall together and I arrive at the destination of my desired perfection.

 

Chasing after perfection is not living.

 

 

I’ve been spending my mornings out on my back porch, with a freshly brewed French press coffee, my moleskin notebook, my Bible, and the latest McManus book. I’m fighting through all of my inadequacies and doubts. I’m establishing the stark difference between comfort and challenge, pleasure and purpose. I’m gaining so much vision for the rest of my life and realizing how much I desire to no longer live for myself, trapped by my own doubts and failures. I desire to walk into the glorious existence that Christ has had for me all along. 

 

I’m allowing myself to dream again.

I’m dreaming big.  

“Great lives are born out of great dreams, often through great sacrifice and great suffering. You cannot even begin to live the dream God has for you until you stop caring only about yourself.”

–Erwin McManus, Wide Awake