Lessons from the Desert

I've spent the last ten years in the desert.

Not literally. But close enough that it's been more than a metaphor for quite some time.

A long time ago, a job ended for me. It was one that I thought defined me. The ending was disorienting. The work disappeared, the identity disappeared with it, and I found myself in a kind of wilderness I hadn't seen coming and wasn't prepared for. No map. No timeline. No burning bush telling me where to go next. Just the daily reality of building something new from the rubble of something old, one project at a time, trusting that the next thing would come before the last one ran out.

It mostly has.

That's the manna part of the story.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Exodus

Most people know the broad outline of the Exodus. Moses, Pharaoh, plagues, Red Sea, freedom. And then, forty years wandering in the desert before the Israelites reach the Promised Land.

I grew up hearing it taught a certain way. God's people sinned, doubted, complained, and as a consequence, they wandered. The faithless generation had to die off before their children could inherit what had been promised. Divine punishment. Forty years in timeout.

That's what I always thought.

A recent speaker I heard challenged that framing directly.

"That's not our God. He is not that capricious."

(Yea, I had to look it up, too.)

Wait, what? Then, what was it?

I've recently started a new pursuit of what this desert season was supposed to be teaching me. What were God's lessons for his people? What does he want me to know?

Yes, I want to move from "manna to milk-and-honey." I want to reach my Promised Land. But more deeply, I want to live in greater alignment with God's purpose for my life and serve the Kingdom well. So, what does that all mean?

Re-Learning an Old Story

Start with the geography, because it's more revealing than most Sunday school lessons let on.

The Sinai Peninsula is not vast and unknowable. A direct route from Egypt to Canaan – the coastal road – was a two-week walk. Even the longer inland routes through the wilderness would take two or three months at most.

The Israelites were not lost.

Most serious biblical scholarship suggests they spent the bulk of the forty years at or near Kadesh-Barnea, a single region on the edge of the Negev. Not aimless wandering. Periodic movement, yes. But also long periods of deliberate, extended encampments. There's a significant difference.

Jethro

Re-exploring the text, here's a sub-story that I overlooked: Moses' father-in-law Jethro comes to visit him in the wilderness. In the desert. Brings Moses' family. Shares a meal. Observes Moses at work for a full day. Offers brilliant advice about organizational structure and delegation. And then goes home.

Jethro goes home.

Nobody panics. Nobody says, "wait, you can leave?!" Nobody follows him out. More than a million people – or even a fraction of that, depending on how you read the census numbers – are camped in the wilderness, and a visitor arrives, spends time, and departs without incident.

They weren't lost. They were becoming.

That's the reframe. The forty years in the desert wasn't a punishment. It was a formation.

Egypt does not produce free people. Egypt produces slaves, and slavery is not just a physical condition. It's a psychological one.

You can get people out of Egypt in a day.

Getting Egypt out of the people – that takes dramatically longer.

Think about what had to be built from nothing in that wilderness.

• A legal identity – the Torah at Sinai.

• A worship structure – the Tabernacle.

• A military organization.

• A tribal hierarchy.

• A coherent sense of peoplehood separate from four hundred years of Egyptian cultural absorption.

• A psychology of freedom rather than the psychology of bondage – which is the hardest thing to build, and the most necessary.

None of that happens in two weeks on the road.

Manna

Every morning, God provided for that day. Gather what you need. Not more. On the sixth day, gather double – the Sabbath rhythm built into the food supply itself. Don't hoard. Don't panic. Trust the pattern.

Every. Single. Day. For forty years.

That is not punishment. That is curriculum. God was teaching a people who had spent four centuries with no agency over their own survival how to live in daily, trusting dependence on a provision they did not control and could not stockpile. It was, as later biblical writers would remember it, something close to a honeymoon – raw, close and direct. A people and their God, learning each other in the wilderness, before the complexity of settled life made everything harder.

Spies

The hinge of the story is Numbers 13 and 14.

Moses sends twelve leaders into Canaan to scout the land. They come back. Ten of the twelve say: "The people there are giants. We felt like grasshoppers in our own sight. We cannot do this."

The land was ready. The people were not.

Not militarily, not logistically. Psychologically. A people who see themselves as grasshoppers cannot take a land, regardless of what they've been promised. The generation that needs to walk into Canaan has to be a different generation – not just older, but genuinely different in how they understand who they are.

That doesn't happen by decree. It happens through forty years of daily formation, daily provision, daily practice of being a free people rather than a slave people.

The grasshopper problem isn't a military problem.

It's an identity problem.

And God, it seems, is very patient with identity problems. He just keeps showing up with manna every morning until you're ready.

My Journey in the Desert

I didn't see any of this until recently – not in the text, and not in my own story.

Both were hiding in plain sight.

The last ten years of working independently, project by project and client by client, have been my own version of the wilderness. I have said – and meant – that "God has my job." That he has provided. That the work has come, not always in abundance, but always in time. Manna. Not a feast, but never famine. Just enough, just in time, every morning I showed up and trusted the pattern.

What I didn't see clearly until I looked at it from this angle is that the provision was never the main event. The formation was.

These years have forced a complete excavation of identity. Not just professionally – though there's plenty of that – but personally, spiritually, fundamentally.

Who am I when no institution is defining me? What do I actually believe, and what was I just performing because it was expected? What is the work I'm genuinely made for, versus the work I did because it was available?

Those are not easy questions. They are not quick questions. And they cannot be answered from inside the noise of a full calendar and a comfortable paycheck. They require the desert.

From slave to son.

From owned to owner.

From a borrowed identity to a true one.

I didn't choose this season. But I'm starting to understand it differently.

Seen

There's one more thing about the Jethro story I can't leave alone.

Jethro comes in from outside. He's not an Israelite. He has no skin in the political dynamics, no history with the complaints and power struggles, no stake in the hierarchy. He watches Moses work for one day – one day – and sees what Moses cannot see from the inside: You are going to wear yourself out, and the mission with you.

The structure isn't working. Here's a better way.

Moses, who has been living this every day for years, needed someone to come in from outside to see the shape of it clearly.

That's the job I've landed in. Coming in from outside. Watching for a day. Seeing what people can't see when they're inside the thing. Helping organizations ask the questions that don't get asked when everyone is too deep in the daily grind to look up.

I didn't design it that way consciously.

But I think the desert designed me for it.

(Bonus: It also never dawned on me to directly overlay Moses' 40 years in the desert after escaping Egypt – a time spent personally re-forming and re-establishing his own identity – with Moses now leading his people – for the same time-frame for the same purpose. That is wild. God's grand narrative arc never fails to amaze me.)

Zoom Out →

The Exodus story is usually told as a story about escape.

Israel gets out of Egypt, and that's the victory.

But the escape is just the beginning. The real story is what happens in the wilderness. The slow, difficult, daily work of becoming who you were always meant to be, now that no one else is defining you.

Most of us who have been through a wilderness season of our own – a job loss, an identity crisis, a season that stripped away the things we thought were holding us up – tell it the same way at first.

We were lost.

We were wandering.

We were waiting for it to be over.

And then, sometimes much later, we look back and see the shape of it differently.

Not lost. Becoming.

Not punishment. Formation.

Not wasted time. Curriculum.

The land was ready before we were. It's still ready. The only question, at every stage of the desert, is the same one it always was:

Do you see yourself as a grasshopper, or do you see yourself as someone who belongs in the promised land?

The Big Picture

I don't know where you are in your own desert.

Maybe you're early in it, and it still feels mostly like confusion and loss. Maybe you're deep in it, and the manna is showing up, but you're tired of manna. Maybe you're further along than you realize, and you've been doing the formation work without calling it that.

Wherever you are, the desert is not the destination.

It's the preparation.

The forty years were not the point. The Promised Land was the point. Everything in the wilderness – the manna, the Torah, the Tabernacle, the battles, the failures, the corrections, the long, slow formation of a free people out of a slave people – all of it was aimed at something. A life, a land, a fullness that the desert was building you toward the whole time.

Zoom out far enough, and even the hard years start to look like preparation rather than punishment.

That's been the lesson of my desert, anyway.

And I'm finally starting to believe I'm near the edge of it.