SSMT: Verse 8

I am very excited about this SSMT verse. Verses, actually. I have what I feel is a very beautiful story about how I came across them (again) and something God taught me through their discovery. I'm saving it to share with you in just a few days. Today I want to focus on the verses themselves.

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

I hope I can learn all that!

If you've read my blog very long, you know last year was mostly a desert experience for me. And today I want to share with you what this verse means to me from that vantage point.

My desert began because Isaac said he was going into a wilderness. My goal was not to copy him. Fine - you're going into a wilderness? I'll go into a desert! No no. Not the goal. But because he shared with me what God was asking of him in that season, my heart was sensitive enough to hear that God was calling me into a desert of my own. It was always important to me that his journey be called a wilderness (because that's what he called it) and mine be called a desert, because they were not the same. He went one way and I went another. And I have no idea what he learned in his path. I can only speak for what I learned in mine.

But from this side, I can say it would not surprise me at all if God sat on His Throne and looked down over my life and said to Himself, The time has come for this baby girl to go on a journey. I'm going to allure her. (Allure means to attract toward something. Trust me. It wasn't an attractive thing...but I felt attracted to it anyway, because God drew my heart.) I'm going to lead her into this desert. Just the two of us.

There was nothing haphazard about that desert. Others looking in saw it as depression...pitiful attachment to love...weakness. But I was completely confident in what it was. It was God's ordained plan. He led me there. And when it was over, He led me out of it.

While I was there, He spoke so tenderly to me. My study Bible said the word "speak" is one of the most generic words in the whole Bible, but it encompasses promises, announcements, instructions, reports, directions and decrees. And it felt like that to me. I carried my journal with me everywhere. To work, to church, in the car, and everywhere in between. God spoke often and I didn't want to lose any of the tender words that fell from His Spirit to mine.

I'm not entirely sure what the second half of this means to me. I am not sure what vineyards He gave back to me...how that deep, dark valley will become a time of hope in the grand scheme of my life, or how it will cause me to sing and praise.

But I am confident all those things are true.

God did not take me through that very intense time of life just for fun. He had a plan in all of it. Things are happening behind the curtain of my life - things I can't see. And bit by bit, He reveals how the pieces are working together for His glory in my future.