Before God sends people out, He often pulls them away.
If you read the Bible looking for a pattern, here’s one that jumps off the page: right before somebody does the big thing, they disappear for a while.
Moses spent forty years tending sheep in Midian before the burning bush. Jesus spent forty days in the desert before His public ministry. Paul, fresh off the Damascus road, went to Arabia (Galatians 1:17) before he ever planted a church. David wrote psalms in caves while he was running for his life.
That’s a lot of wilderness for a book about people God used.
We don’t do quiet anymore
Most of us couldn’t survive forty minutes in the wilderness, much less forty days. We fill every silence. Podcast in the car. Phone in the bathroom. Show on in the background while we “relax.”
I’m not preaching at you. I’m describing my Tuesday.
The problem isn’t that any one of those things is evil. The problem is that the noise never stops long enough for anything to grow underneath it.
What the wilderness actually does
The wilderness isn’t punishment. Look at what happens there:
- It strips away the extras. Jesus was hungry. Moses had sheep and a stick. There’s not much to hide behind.
- It tests what you really want. The temptations in the desert were all shortcuts: bread now, a platform now, power now. Jesus turned down every one.
- It’s where God speaks. Burning bushes don’t show up in the food court.
A wilderness you can actually take
You probably can’t move to Midian. Your boss would have questions. But you can build small wildernesses into a normal life:
- A morning with no input. Before the phone, before the news, sit with a Bible and a notebook. Read. Pray. Write down what comes.
- A fast with a purpose. Skip a meal, or a week of social media, and give that time to prayer. Fasting isn’t a diet. It’s making room.
- A walk with nothing in your ears. Just you, the trees, and whatever’s been rattling around in your head.
- A season, not just a day. Pick thirty days. Name what you’re stepping away from and what you’re stepping toward.
I don’t fast all the time. But some of my biggest breakthroughs have come while I was fasting. A few years ago, I joined my church’s 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. Over those three weeks I read almost the entire Bible, and I ate a grand total of nine meals.
I was visibly smaller by the end. People kept coming up to me at church to talk about how much weight I’d lost. I found that a little odd, because, well, weren’t we all supposed to be fasting? Or so I thought.
But here’s the thing: the weight was the least important part. You shouldn’t fast for the weight loss. Fast for a purpose. A struggle, a need, a decision you can’t see your way through. Not for fasting’s sake, and definitely not for the bathroom scale.
The story under the story
We tend to read the wilderness parts of the Bible as the boring setup before the good stuff. But for Moses, the burning bush only made sense because of forty years of quiet. Jesus walked out of the desert “in the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14). Something happened out there.
Solitude isn’t the opposite of the mission. It’s where the mission comes from.
If you feel stuck, maybe you don’t need more input. Maybe you need a little wilderness.