What the Wilderness Was Building

"...Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness." - James 3:17-18 NIV

Have you noticed that if someone keeps an early rising habit long enough there comes a morning when the alarm is almost unnecessary? The body has already chosen to wake before it sounded. What once required a push simply stops, not because the habit changed but because something inside the person shifted. It's hard to remember which morning. It just happened.

James, the brother of Jesus, noticed the same thing in that quiet place inside us where we sense God's nearness and the slow work of becoming our truest selves happens. Those who sow there reap a harvest that was never theirs to produce. It comes on its own schedule, always larger than the sowing seemed to warrant. Not a promise of prosperity, just a promise that the returning is shaping us into someone new. What we keep returning to, we are slowly becoming.

That kind of becoming rarely announces itself. The Bible tells of a man named John who spent years in the wilderness before anyone knew his name, "...living in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel." The until is that stretch of time when we keep returning, long before any fruit appears. We're living in that stretch now.

You know that moment of hesitation before returning to that quiet place inside, even after a hundred such returns? That hesitation usually means something real is happening. We are in the middle of being shaped, not at the end. Paul knew this season: "...suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character." Romans 5:3-4. The returning and staying are the quiet work, building something we can't quite see yet.

Zechariah was a priest whose voice had been taken after he doubted an angel's promise. When his son was born, everyone expected the child to carry his father's name. Instead Zechariah wrote, "his name is John," exactly as the angel said, and his voice returned immediately. Those months of silence had been gathering toward this. What came out wasn't speech. It was praise, the sound of a soul shaped by that long season of returning.

Returning to that quiet place inside after absence, we find something steadier than expected, the discovery that the Presence we kept coming back to has become the place where we live. The staying grows longer and the returning grows lighter. At some point we see the wilderness was not something to endure on the way to that place. It was where that place was being built all along.

The harvest James describes arrives without ceremony, the way readiness always does. What the wilderness was building was a person who no longer needs to find the way back. Come and see.

Prayer

Lord, we had no idea what the wilderness was building. Thank You the shaping was happening through every return. Teach us to trust this rhythm and rest in the Presence. Amen.