“It isn’t a safe place, except when accompanied by the Divine Shepherd.�: Having just returned from a difficult wilderness experience, I can answer that question with a resounding AMEN! The words of Hos 2.14 are still ringing in our ears: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.� I can say that we truly experienced this verse during our time in Washington. (Appropriately, we lived in eastern Washington, which is a far cry from the near-constant rainy drizzle that graces Seattle. It quite literally is a desert – eight inches of rain a year!) God “allured/seduced/tricked� us into moving there with the promise of launching an alternative, emergent-style worship service. He led us into the wilderness, away from our support network of family and friends and everything that we knew. Then we had to wait three years for the service to finally come to fruition. And then I realized it wasn’t even what I wanted to do! But in the midst of all that waiting, struggling, longing and crying, we experienced God “speaking tenderly� to us, reminding us of his presence, that only he (and not “success� or career advancement) can truly satisfy us. (My spiritual director calls God “the great Con Man� because of how he often does stuff like this! He tricks us into doing something or going somewhere under the guise of some project or relationship, and then when we get there we find he has much deeper purposes than said project. Again, a huge part of God’s agenda in such desert experiences – at least in my experience – seems to be to bring us to the end of our own resources, to confront us with our practical idolatry so we’ll stop trusting in other things (chiefly ourselves) and learn to trust him instead.