How the Wilderness Weathers Worthwhile Things
by Grace Shaffer
In the transition period between December and January, I usually drag out my old journals and spread them across the floor, tracing the patterns of my life like growth rings of a tree. Some sections of my life I enjoy reminiscing over more than others, but the moments I revisit more are the pockets of time I don’t care to air out much publicly.
Before you assume I possess a cruel penchant to relish in the most cringe-worthy seasons of life, I think this habit comes from deep desire to feel transformation tangibly under my fingertips. I want to peer at the person I was in the past and see if I even recognize them anymore.
The entries I keep circling around were written during the October I turned twenty-four in a small red cottage buried in the heart of the Northern California redwoods. Wandering among the fern-framed trails felt like breathing for the first time in a long while.
There was something healing about being surrounded by growth, to know that even though it was undetected on the surface, these California coastal grew as we all do, one thin tree ring at a time.
We don’t often celebrate the grunt work of change—the messy red-ink smeared drafts, the margins marked by defeat, or the paragraphs punctuated by pain. We long for the seasons brimming with milk and honey and get frustrated by the detours through the dry spells. We want the mountain vistas, not the tortuous trek to get there.
But the Bible constantly points to these incisive moments where we truly brush shoulders with transformation.
Last year, I stumbled on Psalm 126, a tiny unassuming Psalm buried between, “The law of the Lord is perfect” and sometimes overshadowed by, “My soul waits for the Lord.”
The most striking thing about this psalm is the ending verse: “He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him” (Psalm 126:6 ESV).
The psalmist doesn’t dismiss the tears; he doesn’t brush aside the soul racked by weeping. But he does bring hope. He reminds us that “our labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58 ESV).
We will learn to breathe again, dream again, be again because God is in the business of crafting our deepest pain into paragraphs of purpose and grace in the most unexpected ways possible. But we wouldn’t know how to recognize the seasons of harvest if we never experienced the seasons of drought.
Those chicken-scratch journals on my shelf remind me of where I was a couple years ago—reeling and a bit lost, still nursing some wounds a series of bad decisions had left behind. The days seemed smeared with a veneer of deep depression and a longing to be more than the sadness I carried between my lungs.
But now, as I look back on what God has done over 2021, all the points in time when I thought He wasn’t moving, all the moments where I thought I was breaking beyond belief, brought me to a space wide open with opportunities to share with others what was sown in the desert.
I don’t know where 2022 finds you, but if you’ve been trudging through the wilderness I hope you cling to these four truths:
01. Your pain is not your own. Paul mentions,“He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:4-5 NLT).“ Your moments of longing and waiting are to mold you into kinder, more compassionate human that can, in turn, comfort others as they walk the same path of suffering.
02. Cling to His omniscience. Perhaps, one of the most profound things I learned coming out of a stagnant season is the incomparable omniscience of Christ. If you’re in the drought, learn to dig deep, knowing in God’s timeline, if our lives are a vapor (James 4:14), then this season is just a blip. You are more than a survivor, more than a conqueror even (Romans 3:7) when you openly embrace surrender to His omniscience.
03. Seek community. James says, “Confess your sins to one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Seek out someone who can help you cut through the fog with truth. The thing with healing is we don’t have blatant benchmarks that inform us how far we’ve come. We need our people to give us that objective birds-eye view of how far we’ve come.
04. Draw close. Finally, lean into the season, knowing God doesn’t lead us to the wilderness to abandon us but to strip us clean of the distractions in our lives. In the desert, we see distance is not absence but rather a call to deeper presence with Him. In every mention of the wilderness, people came out stronger with a clearer picture of their mission, with a clarity of the presence of God.The starkness of the desert isn’t intended to exploit but to reveal how everything else dims in comparison to the deep satisfaction found in His presence.
It is in the wilderness where we learn to tune our hearts to His voice.
It is the wilderness where we will find worthwhile things.
About: Grace Shaffer is an Asian adoptee, a California native, and a Florida transplant with an insatiable passion for capturing the grace-filled stories God imprints on people’s lives. She books up her free time reading secondhand classics and drinking a disconcerting amount of coffee. You can find more of her musings on IG @typesofgrace or on her blog Types of Grace.