This season feels like nothing is happening. My life is on hold and I cannot tell whether I am being prepared for something or simply stuck.

“And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.”

Moses addresses a generation standing on the edge of the land, and tells them to remember the forty years of wilderness behind them. It was not the route anyone would have chosen and it was not brief. But he speaks of it as the way God led them, not as a detour God tolerated. Those empty years were forming them in ways nobody could see while walking through them.

“And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered.”

Luke says Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Not permitted into it, not lost in it. It was the road he was taken along on the way to everything that followed, and it was hungry, long and thoroughly undramatic before it was anything else. In scripture the wilderness is very rarely a sign that someone has gone wrong.