Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
And speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
And will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
As in the day she came up out of Egypt.
Hosea 2: 14-15
When I first read this set of verses, I’ll be honest… it
didn’t make me happy. Quite the
opposite actually…. I grew very angry with God. At the time these set of verses first began to be massaged
into my heart I was walking through ” a desert”… one of the hardest ones I’d
walked through in my adult relationship with Christ. When God showed me these verses, therefore, I grew very
frustrated. I began to say to God
“If you really knew me, why would you ever lead me into the desert to ‘speak
tenderly to me’? Why not take me
to the ‘seaside’ or the ‘mountaintop’?
Why would you take me to the desert?”
Honestly God’s answer to this question is one of the
sweetest moments I think that I have had on this Race. I’m going to try and explain it to you,
to give you a better picture:
In my minds eye I saw this picture of the Beloved, with the
most tender and gentle smile, and His eyes were filled laughter… merriment. He wasn’t distraught by my questions, nor was He
disappointed. On the contrary I think He was overjoyed that I would ask…
because in asking, He could share His heart! He just tipped His head back and laughed and then
looked on me with the kind of love that takes your breath away. The words I then heard went something
like this:
“Jordan, the valley isn’t a season of forgetfulness on my
part… I know you so well! It isn’t
even a season of my being hard on you or “teaching you a lesson” as if you were
some naughty child. It is a season
of GRACE.
In the desert you draw so close to me. So close that I could even whisper and be
heard. There aren’t the
distractions of the mountaintop or the noise of the most beautiful of seas,
although these things too are by my grace that you have received them. But the desert is a season of intimacy…
it is there that hope is restored… the intimacy with me that you receive in the
desert is what makes the mountaintops so sweet and the waterside so peaceful,
because you have gained a greater insight into who I AM. Here I can pull you to my chest and allow you to hear my heartbeat. The “easy” days are then just a
CELEBRATION between the great love between you and I.. an intimacy that was
gained in the desert place.”
I can no longer ask God to remove the desert seasons from my
life. I’m learning to say “thank
you” for the desert. “Yes and Amen”
to the trials. Granted, I am quite
certain that it will be a lesson I work on for all my days. It has truly been with the “sand under
my feet” that I have learned about hope… and no sweeter singing has risen from
my lips then when I had to walk upon the sand of the driest of deserts. The deserts, although the most difficult,
have also been the seasons where I have learned the most… they have been some
of the sweetest seasons of the Race… but more than that, they have been some of
the sweetest seasons on this Journey, the one we all take. It is there in the dryness that I have
come to know Jesus in ways that I at one time could only hope for. It is there I have learned that He is
truly Faithful.. He is truly Good… His arms do hold me… and that HE IS ALL I
NEED!!!
