Finding My Word In The Wilderness

As 2021 came to a close on New Year’s Eve, I found myself in COVID quarantine at home, sitting alone in a bedroom, group streaming an episode of The Simpsons with my 14 year old in the next room.  We were going through a very difficult time as a family.  I had recently started a new job, my wife was recovering from cancer surgery just a few weeks prior, my teenager had just come out as transgender, and here I was locked up in solitary confinement instead of being able to take care of my family.  Welcome to 2022.

On New Year’s Day, since I found myself with a lot of free time on my hands, I decided to commit to doing something that I have never done consistently:  reading the Bible.  In fact I decided I wanted to try to read the entire Bible in a year, so I found a chronological reading plan and got started.  (Read an update on that here)

The next day I was watching a church service online and the pastor was talking about finding your “word in the wilderness”.  Many times people in the Bible, including Jesus, would go out into the wilderness to connect with God and receive His word.  So I figured that since I already felt like I was alone in the wilderness, I would do something else that I had never done before, and that was get on my knees in prayer and ask God what His word for me was. 

Discovering My Word

As I sat there in silence, the chorus from a song (that I actually don’t even like that much) popped into my head.  The song was Trust In You by Lauren Daigle.  (NOTE: I don’t have anything against Lauren or that song, I like some of her other songs, that one is just not one of my favorites.)  The chorus “I will trust, I will trust in you” just kept repeating over and over in my mind.  It didn’t take me long to figure out that my word is “trust“.

Trusting In The Lord

Proverbs 3:5 states to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;“.  I am finding this to be a very difficult thing to do at times.  As men we want to be able to fix things, especially when it comes to problems in our families.  Realizing that you can’t fix something like cancer, for example, can be difficult.  Men do not like to feel helpless.  We’d rather drive around lost for an hour than stop and ask for directions. (OK, nobody gets lost anymore with GPS systems, but you get the idea.) 

Trusting in God to take care of something that you can’t fix or control does not come easily.  Especially when you want it fixed NOW.  Surrendering control to the Lord and waiting on His timing is something that I’m going to have to work on, which is probably why He gave me the word “trust” for 2022.