Man Vs Wild

His name is Bear Grylls. That’s right, Grizzly-Bear, “Throw-the-Steaks-on-the” Grylls. If his name were Man Manlison, he wouldn’t be manlier.

Bear Grylls started in the British special forces, climbed Mt. Everest at 23 years old (after he broke his back in three places), circumnavigated the United Kingdom on a jet ski and survives the harshest environments imaginable in the television show, Man Vs. Wild. If you haven’t seen this show on the Discovery Channel, your heart has a giant Bear-shaped-hole aching to be filled.

In the most memorable of episodes, Bear is in the desert and comes up to a pile of elephant dung. Bear then explains that elephant dung contains water. Bear is in the sweltering desert and quite thirsty. Bear picks up the elephant dung and hovers it over his mouth…No, please Bear. Don’t do it! Borrow some water from the camera guy…Nooo!!!

THE DESERT

I feel like Bear Grylls most days. Not in manliness. (No one’s calling me Panther). No, I feel like I got dropped off in the desert, but my camera crew forgot about me. The desert for me has been unemployment, a lack of purpose, a shortage of any real tangible success I can hold on to. Opportunities galore seemingly up for grabs, and yet, my hands stuck in pockets full of super glue.

The one dream I tried the hardest to turn into a desert-oasis, having a non-fiction manuscript published titled, Are You My Life?: Searching for Self, Faith, and a Freaking Job. The book — sorry I mean the manuscript, is my frank, funny, and authentic story of faith, identity, and purpose. I specify manuscript because book means you’ve made it — manuscript means, keep dreaming. If someone’s reading your book, they bought it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If someone’s reading your manuscript, they’ve just stolen your computer from your coffee shop seat when you went to relieve yourself, and while waiting for the pawnshop owner, the hoodlum perused the first page.

For months and months and months my manuscript made it to the hands of many different publishers. And for months and months I prayed my phone would ring with a congratulations from someone else other than a timeshare salesman in regards to a prize I could claim, “If you’ll just come down and hear a short presentation.”

Unfortunately, he was the only one.

So why me and why the desert? Well maybe the answer’s in the Bible. Crazy, I know.

DESERT-REDEMPTION

Throughout the arc of the Bible countless people are forced to the desert. Not just metaphorically as people like me like to complain, but literally in the burning sand and vultures waiting for you to become well-done.

It started with Adam and Eve – the starkest of all desert experiences as paradise must of played in their dreams every night. Then there was Abraham, David, even Jesus was “led by the Spirit” to spend forty days and forty nights alone in the desert. Jesus, the original Bear Grylls?

Then of course there’s Moses and the entire Jewish population in their little jaunt through the wasteland. But Moses just didn’t spend forty years in the desert, he spent eighty! Before leading the Israelites he spent forty years prior with the Midians in “a dry and arid place,” similar to the desert he’d lead his people through. As Os Hillman writes,

The desert was a place of preparation for one of the greatest assignments given to one man. Did you hear what I just said? Yes, the desert was the place of preparation. Moses was battle-trained in the same environment he would spend another forty years to bring a stubborn and willful people out of slavery.

What kind of assignment is God preparing you for? Does He have you in the desert of preparation? Learn well the lessons you are there to learn. You may find you are called   to be a deliverer, just like Moses.

This gives me solace and hope as I feel forgotten, sweaty and unable to swallow. Maybe God’s not punishing us desert-dwellers, he’s preparing? Maybe God’s purpose for you — like Moses, can only be forged in the difficult, in the dire. There’s something significant that happens to us when we are void of what we depended on.  As Dallas Willard writes,

All great works are prepared in the desert, including redemption of the world. The precursors, the followers, the Master himself, all obeyed or have to obey one and the same law. Prophetic, Apostles, preachers, martyrs, pioneers of knowledge, inspired artist  in every art, ordinary men and the Man-God, all pay tribute to loneliness, to the life of  silence, to the night.”

No water, no food, and no shade, it’s easy to die in the desert. No doubt about it. When we’re eyeing a heaping pile of elephant poop to stay alive, it puts things in perspective. But if we can trust God to keep us alive in the desert, in the most unlivable, I think we can trust Him to keep us alive anywhere.

“Behold I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth…I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43:19