IN THE WILDERNESS

I open my eyes, my face stale from weeping, and look up through the dappled shadows. My fingers maul through the earth beneath me; it is dry and bare. My ears bleed in the silence. The abandoned atmosphere suffocates me, and I gasp for a breath of life. The endless crowd of towering trees enclose on me as I sit up. Dirt, dust and broken twigs fall from my knotted hair. Thorns, rocks and sticks pierce my bare skin. I realise that I am naked and that I am utterly alone.

It is within this wilderness that I find myself. I have been brought here, but I am forlorn. No matter which direction I walk, or run, or crawl, I still find myself here. In the wilderness.

It is in this place of unmitigated emptiness, uncertainty and disarray that He reveals Himself to me. It is in this vacuum that He sees me in my most raw, unadorned form. He sees me, He knows me, and yet He loves me. It is in His seeing that I am strengthened and made bold. It is in His seeing that the wilderness no longer holds me in fear and weariness. Rather, I am here bound to the process, the refining and the revealing of Him; the mystery.

The ice-wind that once discomforted me, now builds in me character and fortitude. The solitude of the wilderness that once stripped me of myself, now grows in my being a more unfeigned version of me. My nakedness that was once my humiliation, now is my conviction. The abandoned silence that once dejected me, now yields my heart to comprehend even His most inaudible whispers.

I am the soil, the earth, the clay.

He is el roi.

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