The Painted GospelsSample

In The Wilderness
by Frank Peretti, author of This Present Darkness

No, you didn’t ask for this.

So tired – of everything. Heavenward, a darkness tailored just for you eclipses the face of God and there’s a purposeful, stubborn silence in this place. With God not speaking you’ve nothing left but to wonder, Did I make a wrong turn? Have I sinned? What am I not getting? 

You echo Gideon: “If the Lord is with me, where are all his wonderful deeds I’ve read and heard about?” When do I get a miracle? When’s an angel going to appear to me? I just want Jesus to come back. 

The comforters have been by, meaning well: You need more faith. You need to pray more. You need to read your Bible more, confess your sin, don’t listen to Satan. 

But … this … isn’t that. 

No, this is God. He didn’t need you to ask for it, He led you here anyway, where the pat answers don’t work, the easy routes go in circles, faith is more than a formula and there’s no more coasting.

It’s God’s way. Sometimes going through the pit is the only way to go higher, and God wants to get you there despite yourself. Jesus had to face Satan in the wilderness and now, here you are. Once you knew God’s way: His voice, His strength, His presence, and now … only silence and feeling out of touch. Days of it. Weeks of it. Years.

It’s called “waiting on the Lord” and we all get our turn. God is not gone, He’s just working slowly, covertly, mending things below our notice. If we would be proven, purged, renewed, we all have to go through it, and as the need is, so goes the mending. If we let the Lord take us where He wants us to go, we’ll look back someday, notice how different we are and how different things look and likely ask, Now when did that happen?

In dryness. Despair. Loneliness. Without a map. Not knowing, just trusting. Drifting, but never really lost. Hearing nothing, but never alone. 

And be assured, God always “comes back.”

“Even the youths shall faint and be weary,

and the young men shall utterly fall:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;

they shall mount up with wings as eagles;

they shall run, and not be weary;

and they shall walk, and not faint.”

–– Isaiah 40:29-31