The Desert

What causes a man to lose hope?  To despair so greatly that he would rather die than wade into the deep waters of his pain to discover what God is doing?

A friend of mine tried to take his life this week by swallowing a hand full of sleeping pills.  He has been living in a toxic marriage for the last 5 years and along with a job loss, sent him over the edge.  I cannot imagine what must have run through his mind as he wrote a suicide note to his wife and kids and lifted a handful of little blue tablets to his mouth.  Thank God he was spotted by some passers by at the park who called the police in time.

Why does one person choose to wade into the depth of the pain of life while another chooses to be swallowed up by it?  I have had difficulty reconciling that this week.  It struck me how selfish the act of suicide really is.

Author and counselor Dan Allender says that “suffering can move us toward God or it can move us away from Him and consequently, away from being fully human and alive…if we see our difficult circumstances as a set of problems to be solved as painlessly as possible, then we miss the potential to grasp the nature of the event (and what God would want to bring about in is as a result).  God promises us redemption but his sacred path leads away from safety, predictability, and comfort.  Any attempt to fly over the dangerous terrain or detour to safer ground is doomed because it will not take us to God”

I was reading the story of Hosea this week as I processed what had happened to my friend and the words took me into the desert as well.  I spent many days exploring the Sonoran desert as a boy near by home in Arizona.  It was a place of great beauty and danger as well.  So, why did God use the desert as a place to speak to his beloved? 

Is it because in the silence of the desert we discover our dependence on the noise in our lives?  Is it in the vastness of its landscape that we find our  attachment to the comforts and conveniences of life – the belongings to which we cling for security and pleasure?  Allender says that the desert “shatters our souls arrogance and leaves us crying out in thirst and hunger”   Our soul’s arrogance?  That prideful and self-righteous place we retreat to where we take on life on our own terms.  That defiant and independent stance that puts our agenda ahead of the one that God might have for our lives.

I do not profess to have the answers for the depth of pain that my friend is experiencing but I know that he finds himself far from Eden…in a dry and arid desert where all that he has come to rely on has been stripped away.  I hope that he chooses not to run from the pain that he is experiencing but rather, to persevere in his journey until he discovers the oasis that has been prepared for him just around the corner by a God that has wooed him there…to speak tenderly to him…to let him know that, while the path maybe difficult, it is one of healing when walked with Jesus.