The Wilderness Shall Be Glad For Them

¹“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” (Isaiah 35:1). None of us look forward to being subjected to trials and tribulations or being made to go through the wilderness of affliction. When we find ourselves in the desert where everything is hard, we find ourselves asking God some version of the question: “Why me?” An answer is that these tough experiences that we go through are ultimately for our good and through them we can learn valuable lessons about ourselves, about life, and about trusting in the Lord. But I think there is a more useful question that we can be asking. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, maybe it's time we stopped asking what the wilderness is doing for us and instead all what we can do for the wilderness. If we find ourselves in a hostile environment, we've got two options. We can try to white knuckle our way through it and endure as best we can until the Lord pulls us out of there, or, we can try to change our environment. It may take years of hard work to help the desert to blossom like a rose. We may have people in our life that hate us. Maybe we kind of hate them too. But if we continue to pray even for our enemies and to love them and serve them and cheerfully submit to our Father's will while we are in the wilderness of affliction, then we might just find ourselves no longer in the wilderness because we have been removed from it, but because we through our efforts have transformed it. There are gifts and blessings that only we can bring, and some of those gifts are meant to help reclaim the desolate and wasted places of this world. We can bet that if we do everything in our power to cleanse and nourish and beautify our surroundings, then the wilderness will be glad for us having passed through it.