Desert

I've gone back and forth about how to share with you the few days that followed the wrestling, and in the end I've decided simply not to share them. I'm skipping ahead. You won't miss any details you need, and I think it's just better this way.

That Sunday after the wrestling, God met me with some very unexpected news. Isaac wasn't the only one who got to do time in the wilderness. I had to go, too. Not where he was, obviously, since God had called him to go there alone. But God had plans for me to go into a wilderness as well. (In time, I came to call my journey a desert...just because it was a different journey than the one Isaac took. So after this post, if you see wilderness, you'll know it's Isaac. If you see desert, you can know it's me. But in the journal entry below, I still called it a wilderness.)

God was very specific with me about the reasons I had to embark on this journey. I wrote them in my journal and want to share them with you exactly as they came to me.

This wilderness isn’t just for him. It’s not a territory I planned to enter, but I’m here nonetheless. I want to be faithful to do well in it. To learn in it. To come out a better person than I was when I went in.

1. Fear. I still am consumed by fear. I am fearful of Isaac's rejection, of losing him by choice or by death. I’m afraid of not being enough for him. I’m afraid of losing a blessing because of my own stupidity. I’m afraid of losing control – and I’m afraid of HAVING control.

2. Trust. Trusting God with my future with Isaac, my future for myself…work…writing…trusting God to work in both our hearts…trusting God to grow us in a wilderness.

3. Confidence. Continuing in my newly discovered belief that I am capable with a partnership with the Lord. Continuing to understand worth and beauty in Him.

4. Hope. Not living in pessimism, but living in the hope of a Promised Land!

I want to further explain a few things to you here, because this where it really all began for me.

Fear. Remember the post in which I told you about the time when I thought Isaac died during our online chat because he quit talking? That was not (by a long shot) the only time in these couple of months that I'd been overtaken by crippling fear that he'd died. I didn't tell you about the others because I didn't want you to judge me. (Or turn my name in to your therapist.) I knew that if I didn't get a handle on my fear in general, it was going to paralyze our relationship. It had already paralyzed my life. And like I said in the journal, I wasn't just worried that he'd die and leave me alone. I was consumed by the fear that he would choose to leave me. I had no idea what I would do if that happened. I'd already lost one relationship in my life. I couldn't bear the thought of failing a second time.

Trust. It's the curse of being on your own for so long, I think. You learn to rely on yourself for everything, because if you don't do it, it just doesn't get done! And as a result, I'd grown far too reliant on my own sense of leading and not nearly reliant enough on the Lord. I couldn't quite feel a sense of comfort or peace in placing my Isaac in the hands of my unseen God and believing that God would take good enough care of him. I believed I could take the best care of him, and I definitely couldn't do that if he was off in a wilderness and I was stuck here. And furthermore, because we'd already talked of getting married, I had no idea what to think about my own future in the lands of work and writing and ministry, because I had no idea where I'd be or how long I'd be there.

Confidence. It's never been my forte. I grew up struggling heavily with self-esteem and while my last decade certainly saw significant growth in that area, I still have a hard time with it. The loss of Isaac to a wilderness shattered my confidence. Though he stressed to me this was NOT the case, I still wondered if it was my fault he had to go there. If it was something I did...or worse..did not do. I still missed his texts and calls of affirmation to the point that I believed the absence of the compliments meant they had ceased to be true about me.

Hope. Ask anyone who knows me well. I can be a pessimist! (Sometimes I like to call it being a realist, but it's really pessimism.) I stood in my living room that Sunday and tried to imagine looking out over my future and could not fathom that it would go well. I just knew that waving goodbye to Isaac as he went into the wilderness would be a permanent goodbye. I had this horrible gut feeling he wouldn't come back. How could I find the Promised Land on the other side of the wilderness? (One of the things he specifically said to me in our talk that night when he told me about the wilderness was that I needed to remember that on the other side of the wilderness was the Promised Land. I told him we better not take 40 years to get there.)

So I was consumed by fear, unable to trust, shattered in confidence and sadly lacking in hope. And God knew the only way to conquer these things was to call me away...into a desert.