Editor's Note
At the beginning of 2020, my mentor encouraged me to do some soul tie mapping. For those of you not familiar with Soul Tie mapping, it is basically looking at my life and identifying the people I formed connections with. It is to evaluate sexual, spiritual, emotional relationships in my past and to see how those have led to the choices and decisions that have led me to my current circumstances. (Some biblical examples: Ephesians 5:31, 1 Corinthians 6:16, Samuel 18:1, Numbers 30:2)
She suggested this at the beginning of the hardest wilderness journey of my life! The catalyst was this question I had posed in my frustration: “What is wrong with me? Why do I keep picking men like this?!”
Yet another marriage was coming to an end in spectacular fashion and because of sexual impurity. My first husband in my teen years was never faithful but promiscuous. I caught my second husband posting nude pictures of me online and asking for bidders to have their way with me when he was at work; and as it turned out, my 3rd husband was a pedophile. The 3rd was the reason I found myself in this deep despair and fumbling blindly, lost and disoriented in the dark wilderness place.
The soul tie mapping was the equivalent of me lighting a campfire. It helped illuminate some of the darkness around me. It caused me to stop stumbling blindly and start somewhere. It offered me some light.
There is SO much more to my wilderness journey that I will unpack in coming posts (chapters?), but I tell you this because often we continue stumbling and falling in the darkness instead of standing still and finding the light.
When I got still, I was able to know that He is God. (Psalm 46:10). When I lit the fire and started on the journey of looking at the cycles in my life, the stillness gave me a starting point to understanding the wilderness.
The wilderness, the dry, desolate place can kill you, but only if you let it. The wilderness can seem lonely, empty, and barren if you keep stumbling in the dark and only looking at what is immediately in front of you instead of looking up at the One above it all.
The wilderness IS a place of death, but it does not have to be the place all of you dies.
On day 2 of a 3 day fast, I remember writing this desperate, broken prayer in my journal at the end of my rope, suicidal ideas tickling my thoughts: “God, don’t let me die in this wilderness!”
At the end of the fast, His answer was swift and clear. I will share part of it with you now.
You walk THROUGH the valley of death. That means along the way, things must die.
Your idols of busyness, victimhood, laziness, slothfulness, and self need to die.
Your pride, resentment, envy, bitterness, guilt, shame, and lack of forgiveness need to be purged.
Your lack, orphanhood, mis-identification, distorted image, and alien status must be dealt with.
The wilderness is a place of preparation. Preparation for all that God has in store for you. You cannot enter into His promised land the way you came. In order to carry His glory, for your territory to be enlarged for the completeness of His promises to manifest, there are things in you and around you that you need to put to death.
There are relationships that won’t survive the cross over the Jordan, so in the wilderness, they die.
There are attitudes, thought patterns and ways of being that do you a disservice. There are statements you make that hold you back and keep you stuck in cycles… these need to die.
There are desires, idols, false beliefs, and twisted truths that God will strip you of in the wilderness so you can go unencumbered into the land flowing with milk and honey.
YOU don’t have to die in the wilderness. Instead, if you let Him, God can introduce you to who you really are in the landscape's emptiness. Where things die, God brings to life the truth of who you are.
Where your excuses fall away, He leads you to a friend who can help you put systems in place that move you forward and render the excuses obsolete.
Where toxic relationships fall away, God raises up mentors, friends and online communities that build up who you truly are in Him so that you no longer cling to the distorted images others would have you claim as your own.
He gives you beauty for ashes, He pours the oil of Joy over you and gives you a garment of praise in place of the filthy rags that don’t fit you.
Where your excuses fall away, He leads you to a friend who can help you put systems in place that move you forward and render the excuses obsolete.
Where toxic relationships fall away, God raises up mentors, friends and online communities that build up who you truly are in Him so that you no longer cling to the distorted images others would have you claim as your own.
He gives you beauty for ashes, He pours the oil of Joy over you and gives you a garment of praise in place of the filthy rags that don’t fit you.
The wilderness does break you. But when you commit your wilderness to God, you are gracefully broken. God as your Father corrects, instructs and resurrects the truth within you. Even in the barren land, you feel hope, joy, and contentment well up in you as living water quenches your thirst. You do not fear the animals howling in the night because you know you are protected under His wing. You understand that though you break, you are put together in the master Potter’s hand. You start to understand the Casting Crowns lyric “Your life is not falling apart, it’s falling into place.”
Beloved, while there are things that die in the wilderness, you are not one. Rejoice in the wilderness, for out of the nothing, God is doing the something that will part the river ahead of you and allow you to walk into the land of His Promise on dry land.
The end...nope, not at all because you didn’t die in your desert season. There was a reason for it. Proverbs 25:2 - It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them.
So ask Him,: "What is the reason for this season?
