One of my favorite podcasts of late, The BEMA Discipleship Podcast, has a great series on the desert, and this one about the shepherd is one I think about weekly. This season of almost constant need-meeting in caring well for our girls can sometimes seem like a desert. But I have experienced God providing the sustenance of energy, joy, motivation and peace in the moment I really needed it and thought I wouldn’t have it.
I have a growing, deepening love and gratitude to God who sees and knows me and always offers Himself.
Marty: One of the things that they’ll talk about is one of the lessons you learn in the desert, is the lesson of just enough. This is going to show up over and over and over again. The desert is not the place of abundance. The desert is a place of just enough. One of the things I remember Ray teaching me was the desert teaches you how to be okay in this moment. You don’t know where the next ten minutes are going to come from. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes and I don’t know if I’m going to have enough, ten minutes from now, but what I know is that if I’m with my shepherd, he’s going to lead me to the place where I have enough for right now, I have enough for a bite in my mouth right now.
Will I have enough, ten minutes from now? I don’t know. I’m going to follow my shepherd and I’m going to trust the shepherd. If we talk about trusting the story, we’ve talked about trusting the story quite a bit. The desert is where you ultimately learn how to trust the story. If you need to get — what did we say that God has to get out of his people? Can you remember?
Brent: Get Egypt out.
Marty: If you’re going to get an entire Egyptian worldview out of your people, there’s no better place than the desert. If you’ve learned in Egypt, how to trust on man, how to trust on Pharaoh, how to trust our ability to produce, and now God’s trying to teach you how to rest and how to trust that he’s going to produce for you, there’s no better place to learn it than the desert, because you have no idea where tomorrow’s going to come from.
You don’t have any idea where this afternoon is going to come from. All you know is that I have what I need for right now.
Photo by Daniel Burka on Unsplash
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