One of the things that kept me holding God at a distance with disappointment and dissatisfaction all my life – punctuating every season of closeness with a bite – was my inescapable sense that he just wasn’t enough. He couldn’t possibly validate my desire for an extraordinary life. That desire had always been with me and spawned countless words on countless pages and the scintillating, sparkling dream of the Venture, of striking out into the wilderness and hacking it out myself to see what I was made of. I’ve long seen that such a dream just wasn’t feasible and it only left me with the itchy sweater of everyone else’s life. The thought that God must have been the origin of such soul-deep desires clashed with the inability to see how the proper, good, and holy God of the church would ever understand or allow them and left me cold.
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I so didn’t want to dumbly fall in with the lockstep of everyone else’s life. Something deep within me cried out that I was different, that such a life would be the death of me. But no one knew as well as I that it seemed I had been trained for nothing else. I knew better than anyone how weak and irresolute I could be. I was clamoring for a life that would kill me, that would rip me to shreds where the ordinary life would merely gently, steadily rub me out.
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The irony of it all was that I did want those things, too. I wanted the husband, the children, the well-appointed house, the pew at church as a family, the weekend barbeques. I was as captivated by Donna Reed as I was by William Wallace. How conflicted. And what order could be brought to such chaos? Certainly not God. Wouldn’t he only gently, tolerantly guide me to the dovecote and mercifully clip my wings so I couldn’t injure myself by continuing to throw myself against the mesh?
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Well, I believe I have the answer. I had been turning to God since the whole thing with B____ started to chip. I had to. I conceded absolutely, no pride filling in the cracks with sawdust, that I was completely inadequate to find my own way through the thick of this jungle. And he answered, with the mercy and quieting wisdom my flailing soul needed at that time. He answered by never leaving my abandoned heart.
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But it wasn’t until I read verse 9 in 1 Corinthians 2 that I started to see what I had been missing all my life: the facet of God’s nature that had been reflecting in me all along:
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“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him.”
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And I realized – he is doing just that. My life seems to be all that Donna Reed herself would golf-clap for, and yet he has been leading me straight into the wilderness all these months. It’s damned uncomfortable at times – utterly dark when my little campfire goes out, cold sometimes under my flea-bitten blanket, sore feet. I’m sick of sleeping on the ground.
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But I’m doing it! I’m seeing my own worth by seeing God’s. I do have the strength for this life, for this casting off of rules and societal expectations and for leaving the safety of the cubicle and hacking my way into the bush. And that strength is embodied in one thing: the ability to say “yes” and “yes” and “yes” to God as he leads the way.
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I am a warrior. I needed this. I came so close to death so many times in my own life. My safe life held a danger that constantly threatened my very life – myself. I used to think it was because of my terrible, shameful weakness that I dreamed of death so often. What sort of pitiful, pathetic creature was I that I couldn’t handle the ordinary travails of life? And I really thought I could not only survive but thrive in a wild life that would be incomparably harder? What a joke.
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But what I have come to see is that I simply didn’t see the point. Every time I drew near the edge, it wasn’t from the pain of life. It was from the pointlessness of it. What was the point, the purpose of struggling through life? Why endure it? For myself? To carve out a good life for myself? And then what? Was I the whole purpose of my life?
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Not enough.
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I needed this fight. I needed a point in the struggles. I always did. That was the true nail in the coffin in my profession – there was no point to all I did.
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But now I do have a purpose. I have a fight. I have a reason to face all the trials of life and say, “Screw the pain.” God is simply saying “yes” to my desire for the extraordinary life and then whispering, “You up for this?”
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“Yes,” I say stubbornly back to him, feeling life curl up in me where there was none before. “We’re wildernessing.”
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Hit it.
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