Darkness is the winter of the soul, the time when it seems nothing is growing. But winter, we know, is the fallow time of year. Winter is the time when the earth renews itself. And so it is with struggle. Unbeknownst to us, struggle is the call and the signal that we are about to renew ourselves. Whether we want to or not. ...

... Struggle is what forces us to attend to the greater things in life, to begin again when life is at its barest for us, to take the seeds of the past and give them new growth.
--Joan Chittister, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003) 38-40.

The process of struggle is the process of the internal redefinition of the self. ... When our expectations run aground of our reality, we begin to rethink the meaning and shape of our lives. We begin to rethink not just our past decisions but our very selves. It is a slow but determining deconstruction of the self so that the real person can be reborn in us, beyond the expectations of others, even beyond our own previously unassailable assumptions. ...

Struggle is always an invitation to a new life that, the longer it is resisted, the longer we fail to become who we are really meant to be.
--Joan Chittister

For the most part, we live our lives trying to avoid the wilderness. We know intuitively that the wilderness will not offer peace and gentleness. Instead it will offer truth we would rather not face. We know that the wilderness will not let us off the hook--we will need to face ourselves squarely. Rather than being stripped bare, being left defenseless, raw and vulnerable, we choose instead to fill our lives with everything that has the potential of making us dead in the midst of life. And what is most tragic is that, most often, we are completely unaware that this is what we are doing. We fill our lives with busyness--television, surfing the net, friendships, shopping, reading, sex, eating and drinking. These are not bad in themselves, but they have an underbelly. They too easily become the dull routine of our days, our weeks, our months, our years. And then we wonder why our spiritual life feels flat, why we lack hopefulness, why we sense a 'dry as cardboard' callous over our souls. We wonder why we have no real compelling story to tell others. We wonder why our faith doesn't seem to touch our daily lives, and why holiness seems distant, and even unwelcome. We wonder why there's a disconnect between what we say and what we do, what we believe, and how we behave, what we judge in others and want forgiven in ourselves. We wonder why life seems so routine, so regular, so restless. We wonder why we feel a lack of true meaning and purpose. We wonder why we're tired and stressed. We wonder why we are unable to know God, hear God, feel God's Spirit pulsing loudly and clearly in our souls. It is because we have allowed life to crowd out our intimacy with God. We have avoided being courageous and bold in grappling with those inner demons that threaten to squeeze life right out of us. We have avoided the desert.

We might wonder how we would even know if we were being driven to the desert and what we would do if we were being driven? I can tell you that if you are experiencing any of the symptoms I just spoke about, you are being driven into the desert. If you are longing to know God, longing to be made whole by God, longing to belong to God, longing to find what seems to be missing in the daily round of the rigors, rituals, routines, and responsibilities of life, then that is the spirit of God calling you to the desert.

There's a lovely verse--one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture, since I'm such a 'desert spirit' --from Hosea. God says, "I will allure her, and bring her into the desert wilderness, and there I will speak tenderly to her heart." The desert is fearful to be sure, but it is filled with grace.
I once did an 8-day silent private retreat and the design of the retreat included praying with Scripture passages for 5 hours every day. I had been feeling that my routines and constant stress were sapping my life away and leading me further and further away from God, and so I thought this intense kind of retreat would help me re-focus, and I could say at the end that I had done it. Kind of like someone who makes it through an Outward Bound experience.

But I'm a person of high-energy, and I like being in control of my own life. I like to know the when, where, how and with whom of what I'm doing. The thought of silence was not daunting to me. But the thought that I was going to have to sit still with Bible passages for five hours every day was so beyond my comfort zone that I decided to cancel the retreat. I also knew the verse from Hebrews that says that "the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

In other words, I knew that five hours a day with Scripture was going to strip my heart and soul and I wasn't sure I was actually ready for that! So, I called the person who was to be my director for the retreat and explained that I simply couldn't do the retreat. After being questioned about why I thought I had to cancel, I said, "Well, truthfully, it's the praying with Scripture for five hours every day. How am I possibly going to be able to do it? The director said to me, "You're not going to do it. God is."

I went on the retreat. And though I was in a retreat center in the middle of Chicago, it was a desert wilderness for me. I was exposed to myself in a way that I had never been before. In that silent and isolated place in the middle of the city, I struggled, I rebelled, I prayed, I wept, and I came out of that retreat a changed woman. I had been lured to the desert and there God had spoken tenderly to my heart.

So when you are being driven into the desert - go. Go where you can be alone with God in the huge silence. Stop trying to fill your life with yet one more self-help technique to make life meaningful or bring sense into the chaos and stress. Instead, take yourself to that place of terror where you are exposed to yourself, where you must face the reality of your desire to be important, to have power and control, to be self-sufficient. Go to the desert to hear the Voice of God that brings you life again. Go to the desert so that you can be prepared for life outside the desert.
--from Renee Miller, “Is the Desert Calling You”


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