MENDING IN THE DESERT

We tend to mark out our lives by our successes or our failures. But when we do deeply fail, we want to slip into the shadows, lick our wounds, and grieve the loss of what we thought we had. But God doesn't measure our lives out the way we do. The world teaches that when you're broken, you just have to make do. Yet scripture is filled with men and women who failed deeply, yet rose from their failures and were used greatly. If you are hurting, or if you've caused hurt, you are in good company.

I have thought a lot about Moses because, through my own hand, I ended up in my own desert. I went from the shine of the megachurch world to a quiet, rural place where I tended my own sheep, a place where I felt completely forgotten.

Obscurity and deep hurt are exactly where God mends, heals, and remakes us. The remaking never feels good. And it can be a painful, lonely valley. But if God is to do a new work, He cannot use our old selves. The pride, ego, and assumptions of the old things of Egypt stand in the way of a new and refined faith. And like a surgeon, He cuts out the old disease so we can fully heal.

There is a deep wisdom to be found in obscurity. In Exodus 2:15, after taking a man’s life, Moses flees to the remote land of Midian and sits down by a well. It reads matter of fact on the page, but in reality, the weight of what he has done sits thickly upon him, he has just squandered his position, his privilege, and the inkling of a calling he once held. So Moses wraps himself in obscurity for forty years. He hides and if he was anything like myself, he cannot escape the memory of his failure and he rehearses it over and over. Morning and night. Scripture is silent on whether Moses spoke with God during those long valley years. Maybe, like I did, he tried to distance himself. Perhaps he was just trying to forget the past and what he had lost.

But God doesn't forget.

If you are in your own personal Midian today, feeling forgotten or broken, remember that the Lord of All New Things knows your name. He knows every hidden wound you carry within your breast. He doesn't measure success by human standards nor is He disappointed or angry with you in your failure.

A.W. Tozer once wrote, "It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” God doesn't want for our pain, but He chooses to redeem it for our good. Tozer suggests that God uses it to break the pride that prevents a full reliance on Him, ultimately forging a deep and robust spiritual maturity. It is the tool He uses to break us from our old selves so we can be shaped for greater service and deeper humility.

Remember this: There is much more to you than your pain and your past failures. Like Moses, God looks to draw you out, breaking off the weight that mars and distorts your soul. You may never lead millions like Moses did, but in these difficult days, you were meant to be a light and a balm to those in your small slice of your world.

Let Him do the work in the unseen and obscure places of your life. Let Him fashion you into a beacon for those wandering in their own Midian. Coming out of the valley of obscurity and your own healed pain, others will see your scars and realize you are no longer defined by them. They will recognize that you understand their grief, and they will follow as you humbly lead them out of their own deserts and into a good land flowing with hope and purpose.

Your pain does not need to define you, but in the proper hands, His hands it can be remade to do good. It can humble and give birth to a new heart of flesh and deeply tie one another together because of that familiarity.

Remember the work He wants to do within you and remember you are the healing balm someone so desperately needs today.

May you rise up and be the hope to another today, so that they themselves might know they are not forgotten.