A few days ago, this photo popped up in my memories on Facebook.

It’s a photo from two years ago at a small group leader training at Pantano Christian Church in Tucson. You see, this was right when the church I planted, Revolution, and Pantano merged. There was so much hope, so much expectation in this photo. This was right at the beginning of what I thought would be a movement of churches around the city of Tucson, all the campuses that would be started because of this one decision, all that God would do through it. This was the beginning of our next chapter in Tucson.

There is so much hope, dreaming and expectation wrapped up in this photo. 

I didn’t know at the time, but now know, this photo was the beginning of the most challenging 18 months of ministry I have ever had. This was the beginning of some incredibly dark nights, long walks in the desert, a lot of shouting and frustration with God, and many hurts. 

It was also the beginning of what would eventually lead to a massive change in my life. 

I texted this photo to a mentor when it popped up, and he asked me, “If you could go back two years, what would you tell yourself?”

If God would’ve told me on that night, that night when I was so excited and full of hope, “Josh, what you don’t know is in 2 years you will be on the other coast. All the dreams you have in your heart won’t come true here. You are about to have the hardest 18 months of your life.” Would I go through with it?

I don’t know. I know I wouldn’t want to, that’s for sure. But looking back, I know I needed to walk this road. 

First off, I’m glad God doesn’t do that. Even though I often wish he would tell me where things end up, I’m happy he takes us one step at a time. 

Looking back, I’m amazed at what God brought us through. 

Over the last two years, I learned things about myself that I needed to know. Katie and I grew closer together in our prayer life as we struggled through what God had for us next. I learned a lot about leadership, emotional health, trust, and the importance of character. I learned things about the church, the leadership gifts and passions I have, and the things I want to accomplish.

I learned a lot about what matters in life and what makes you happy at the end of the day. 

I think dreams and goals still matter, but we need to be prepared for them to be dashed and not come true. 

I learned that a lot could happen in two years. Two years ago, I didn’t know that we would leave Tucson, even though it was time. I didn’t know that we would walk away from the life we had there. I didn’t know that the team of people I worked with for years would disperse and start new things or move to places they dreamed of being. No matter how hard the moment is right now that you find yourself in, it will end, the day will end, the page will turn. 

I learned that God sends people into our lives at the moment we need them. What you don’t see in this picture is that a few months before this, we met a couple, Todd and Karen, that God would use in powerful ways to help us through this season. I was beginning to get to know Todd at this point, but our relationship would deepen, and God would use him to speak truth to me, to challenge me, and they loved Katie and me (and our kids) so well over this last season. 

Sitting there in this meeting, I wasn’t praying for any of those things. I wasn’t praying for God to take me deeper; I wasn’t praying for God to move us; I wasn’t praying for God to end relationships, seasons, or situations. I wasn’t praying for any of the things God was about to do. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t answer my prayers. He did, and is answering them, but he took me on a different path to get there. 

Recently, someone here in Massachusetts commented, “I wished things would’ve gone faster in our search process.” While I understand that feeling when you are searching for a pastor and I appreciate that while searching for a job. The reality is, if things had gone faster in Massachusetts, we maybe wouldn’t have applied because we weren’t ready. I applied for the job in Massachusetts the week that I found out I wasn’t staying at Pantano. It struck me; God opens doors at the right moment. Right as we were trying to figure out what was next, I got a call from a search firm and he said, “Would you be interested in talking with a church in New England?” 

The last learning, at least that I’m sharing now, God is with us in the hope-filled mountaintop and the low, dark valley. God was there that night of the group leader training, a night filled with enormous possibility, and he was there in the darkest moments of 2020 and 2021. 

Back to my mentor’s question. What advice would I give myself? I’d tell myself, keep trusting God. No matter how dark it gets, keep walking, keep trusting. You need to go through everything you’re going through to get to where God wants you. And…don’t forget the lessons you learn in the next 2 years.

At some point in your spiritual journey, you find yourself walking through the painful experience of the silence of God. It can be for many reasons, but it can be hurtful and disillusioning when it happens.

In Psalm 13, David gives voice to what many of us experience:

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long will I store up anxious concerns[a] within me,

agony in my mind every day?

How long will my enemy dominate me?

3 Consider me and answer, Lord my God.

Restore brightness to my eyes;

otherwise, I will sleep in death.

4 My enemy will say, “I have triumphed over him,”

and my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

5 But I have trusted in your faithful love;

my heart will rejoice in your deliverance.

6 I will sing to the Lord

because he has treated me generously.

How do you get to the place David did in Psalm 13 and respond to the silence of God? 

Philip Yancey, in his book Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference? gives some helpful steps on how to handle the silence of God or what seems like unanswered prayer:

Do I have any sins to confess? So many times, our distance from God is because of unconfessed sin. When we struggle to move forward in relationships, when we struggle to hear God, to find freedom in our lives, it is our sin we are carrying around. We haven’t let go of the bitterness, people we still blame, situations we replay in our minds, and secrets we keep hidden.

What are my motives for prayer? Many times we pray to get something, to become rich, to have an easier life. We want God on our terms, and when this happens, we miss God. This is why God feels distant, we aren’t looking for God; we are looking for a version of God we’ve created.

In this, are you listening to God or just talking to God? Our prayer life is often one way, me just telling God what I want, what I need, what he can do. I’m not asking him questions; I’m not listening to him.

Another one is I’ll have people say, “I asked God about ______ “(and in the blank is always something God has already told us the answer to in the Bible), but he didn’t answer. Of course not; he’s already given you an answer. Why does he need to tell you again?

Am I pursuing results rather than closeness with God? I said earlier that the writers of Scripture spend little time answering why suffering happens and more time on what suffering, pain, and silence produce in us. It produces perseverance, character, patience, hope, joy, and so on.

We experience God and grow close to him while we wait. If God answered everything right away when we asked, what kind of faith and trust would we need?

I would say we get closer the longer we are waiting, not always.

Is God preparing me for something? Often God is using our spiritual dryness for something in the future. I read once that a vintner refuses to irrigate his vines because the stress caused by occasional drought produces the best, most tasty grapes. Seasons of dryness make the roots run deep, strengthening the vine for whatever the future holds.

Just like the example of a vintner, the best wine takes time. It waits.

I’ve seen many times in my life that God hasn’t answered my prayers because I am not ready.

Pray with others. This is the power of community groups, praying together, and sharing evidence of God’s grace. When you sit with your group and share how you have seen God work in your life. When you can’t think of any, but the person next to you shares several, yes, you will at first get mad. Why isn’t God moving in my life like he is in yours? Why isn’t God answering my prayers? But you will also start to see, even when you can’t see God at work in your life, he is at work.

Not only that, sometimes you need someone else to have faith for you; sometimes you need someone else to pray for you because you can’t muster the words.

Control.

It is something we all like to have, something we all want to feel we have, and yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we have very little of it.

We can’t control the stock market, our retirement, or our finances. We can’t stop things from breaking or falling apart. We can’t control our friends, our spouse, our kids, or our parents. We can’t control our health, getting sick, something breaking in our bodies, or even stop the process of getting older.

Now, in all of those things, there are things we can control.

We can fight against it and try to keep controlling things.

Which is what a lot of us do. I do it. I like control.

We can throw our hands up in the air and say, “What’s the point?” and give up. Unfortunately, some of us do this as well.

It is a funny thing to think that on the other side of releasing control is hope. That if we let go, we can find joy. It feels backward because we believe that hope and joy are found in control. 

But what if hope and joy are found in surrender?  

As I said on Sunday, we can let go of control when we surrender.

But how? And does it lead us to the life we want and hope for?

So, from one control freak (me) to another (maybe), here are some questions I’ve asked myself along the way to lead to surrender:

1. What am I hoping for in control? What does control get me in this situation? Now, if you are like me, you are thinking, I control things because I care. And that is true. But we still need to ask these questions. Not all control is bad, but most of the control we exert in our lives lacks trust in God.

And at the crux of control and surrender is the question, can I trust God? And it is an important question. Do I believe that God cares about these things and these people as much as I do? Do I believe that God cares about me and my world as much as I do?

The answer is He does, but He cares about them in slightly different ways than we often do. 

But back to the original question: When we exert control, what do we get? What do we hope for?

Often, we hope for comfort and a sense of peace when we control things, but that often backfires on us.

2. What do I control in this situation? Really? As we think about control and what we hope to gain from control, it is essential to step back and ask, “what do I control in this situation? Really?” The reason I like to throw the word really on end is that we can come up with all kinds of things, but that last question forces us to say, do you actually have control there?

Take any situation in your life right now that feels out of control. What control do you have? 

The answer is some. You and I exert influence in all kinds of places that we often underestimate. If you’re a parent, you have a lot of influence on your child’s life. The same is true with finances, your health, and other vital relationships. Although you and I have control, it might be different than we expect. So it is crucial to know where we have control and what control we have. 

So that we can release the control we don’t have, and surrender.

3. What would happen if I release control? In many ways, it is the surrender question; the letting go question.

For many of us, this is also the worst-case scenario question. 

In the areas of your life where you exert control, what would happen if you surrendered those people, situations, and struggles to God? What if you let go?

It isn’t easy, but we know that God is at work through us and in us (Philippians 2:13), and that he will bring that work to completion (Philippians 1:6). That is why we can release control and surrender to God, and in that surrender, we find hope and joy. 

In one of my favorite bible verses, found in John 10, Jesus says, I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. The Message version says it like this: I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.

Life.

Life to the full.

More and better life.

The reality for all of us is that this is what we are looking for and longing to have.

It is why we spend money on things. It is why we pack our schedule, why we have kids, go on vacation, choose the job that we do. 

We do it in hopes of finding life in hopes of finding meaning. 

Yet, few people know what it is they are searching for. 

Have you ever stopped to ask, why am I doing this? And, if I do this, where will it take me? The only time we ask those questions is when stress hits or life falls apart. Another question that rarely gets asked is, “What does this promise me, and will that promise be fulfilled?”

So we pack out our schedules; we run from one relationship to another, never getting too close to people; we find ourselves unfulfilled at every turn, and we wonder why.

For many of us, if you are a Christian, we think that we need to spend more time reading our bibles, being in more bible studies, or praying more. And while those might help, we miss something in the process.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus walks up to people, has conversations with them, and challenges them to follow him.

Then, as they follow him, he doesn’t say this is how early you should pray, this is how much you should read your bible or tithe. Instead, he says, “Watch me, do what I do, take my yoke upon you, and you will find rest. You will find life.”

As John Mark Comer, “To experience the life Jesus has for us, we have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.”

The invitation that Jesus gives to his first disciples and us is not just about heaven and eternal life. It is also about life now and the longings that we all have. The longings for meaning and purpose. Jesus invites them and us to follow him but to stay in the same lane. Not to take them out of their life or out of what they were doing or were passionate about. Were they excited about their job as fishermen and tax collectors? I don’t know, but they did it. And Jesus said they would keep fishing, but in a different way. 

Are we always passionate about our job or stage in life? Sometimes but often, we aren’t.

When Jesus invites us to follow Him, he gives us purpose. He redirects what we are already doing for his purposes so that it brings more fulfillment to us but also a more significant eternal impact.

Jesus is inviting us to see what we do differently so that we can have more and better life. 

Have you ever had a moment where things didn’t go the way you expected them to go? You had a plan, you were working on that plan, but then, it shifted. The job fell through, the money you planned to have got used up somehow, a relationship dried up. Maybe you prayed for something, and God didn’t do what you expected or hoped He would do.

All of us experience that.

For the last year, I expected God to do something. I was so convinced I knew exactly what God was doing, but I didn’t. So what seemed like a perfectly laid out plan for my life didn’t happen.

At first, I was frustrated. I wanted to stop praying. I was so mad at God. Didn’t he know the great plans I had for my life?

As I look back, though, what I saw as great plans were really just easy plans. If I got the job I applied for; my family wouldn’t have to move, we wouldn’t have to leave friends and start over, I would move into a new role at the church I was already on staff at and keep things moving into the next season. It was easy. I also know, now looking back, I wasn’t wired for that, and that wasn’t my next best step.

How do you make sure you don’t waste your desert? Or, as I recently heard Albert Tate say, “What if the season you are in isn’t the test, but the preparation for the test to come?” So how do you make sure you are ready?

This is incredibly important but easy to miss in the desert. But we want to make sure we are prepared for the future God has for us.

As I walked through my most recent desert, here are 3 questions I found helpful to ask:

How are you spending your time in the wilderness? In the desert, it is easy to be like the children of Israel and complain. This makes sense because the desert isn’t fun. It is harsh. It is a barren place with little water, lots of sun, no shade, and creatures that can kill you!

But it is important to ask, how am I spending my time in the desert? And, am I spending my time on the things God is spending his time on in me?

As Katie and I spent months walking around the desert of Tucson behind our neighborhood, we kept asking, “God, what are you doing? What are you doing in us? What are you preparing us for?” These questions shifted our perspective, which is incredibly important to not wasting your desert.

But how do you figure those things out? It is what you do with your time in the desert that determines what happens in the desert.

When Jesus was in the desert in Mark 1 & Matthew 4, he spent his time fasting and praying, so he was ready to battle the devil and do the work in the desert that He needed to do.

Are you moving closer to God or pulling away? Every desert in Scripture is an invitation from God to pull closer to him or pull away from Him. To listen more closely to His voice or to listen more to the voices of those around you. It is a moment to decide if you will dig into the soul work God is doing in you or pull away from that and go the shortcut and skip that hard work.

The shortcut seems easier. The nation of Israel got tired of waiting on Moses to bring a word from God, so they built a golden calf to worship.

The reality of the desert is that God will often seem incredibly distant and silent. You can go weeks, months, or even years without a clear sign from God, a clear word from Him. This is disorienting and disillusioning. In our most recent desert, God felt silent for over a year. It seemed like He was speaking clearly to lots of people around us but not to us. In fact, we almost missed Him because of how He spoke to us about Massachusetts; it wasn’t what we expected Him to do.

If the wilderness is your training camp, what is being toned and strengthened in you? This last question is critical.

The best way to not waste your desert season is to ask: God, what is being strengthened in me? What do you want me to learn about you? About myself.

There are things about God and ourselves that we can only learn in the deserts of life.

Don’t mistake this question, though; this isn’t necessarily why God has you where you are, but it is the path that God wants you on to know what He wants you to know.

As Katie and I walked through our desert in Tucson, God showed us things in our hearts that we ended to know. He showed us what our desires for life, family, and ministry really were and that they wouldn’t be found where we were. He showed me what I really valued in life and what it would take to get to those places. We needed the time of the desert for those things to crystallize in our hearts and minds.

I think something else happens; our faith is strengthened as we dig into God’s word and presence in the desert. As we fight to hear God’s voice, as we strain to hear Him, we learn how to hear Him, and that is such a gift. It is not always easy and obvious, but His voice is always there.

One of the strongest and clearest messages throughout the Bible is God’s love for us. We are reminded that God doesn’t forget us (even though many of us feel forgotten), that God is close to us (even though He often feels far away), and that not only has He created us in His image, but He knows us, and that doesn’t scare Him away (although we always fear that the moment someone truly knows us, they’ll bolt).

And yet, many of us still struggle to believe God loves us.

We believe God loves the world. We believe that through Jesus God will redeem and restore the world, but we have a hard time placing ourselves in that.

So we run, we hide, we put up fronts, wear masks, beat ourselves up for past mistakes, try to earn God’s love, try to prove ourselves worthy of God’s love, and all the while God’s love sits there.

If you’re like me, you can relate to this.

The problem for many of us is that we read verses about God’s love for the world and us (John 3:16), that Jesus loves us (John 15:9), that God predestined us in love (Ephesians 1:4 – 5), that God sings over us (Zephaniah 3:17), that God loved us first (1 John 4:19), that God draws us to Himself (John 6:44). We read the apostle Paul saying over 160 times that as a follower of Jesus, we are “in Christ”, and yet we live each and every day as if God is disappointed in us, indifferent towards us, mildly happy with us or just “likes” us.

We’ll say things like, “I know God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself.” Or, “Yes, God loves me, but I can’t love myself.”

When we say those things, we have made love and forgiveness something it is not. We have based that on our own definitions and life.

Over the last two years, if there is one message that God has put on my heart for me to learn, it is this: His gracious, unrelenting, never stopping love for me.

Personally, I keep going back to Luke 15 and the stories that Jesus told. A shepherd who goes after a lost lamb, a woman who searches for a coin and a father who runs out to meet his son who doesn’t deserve grace, let alone a party. Through this passage, God has softened my heart to understand and feel His love.

Some of us (at least I did) balked a little at this because it seemed too emotional, made God too close and personal, and we feared it would take away His transcendence and power. He’s God, Creator of the universe. Yes, and He’s also a personal God who created you in His image and sent His Son to die in your place so He could rescue you and so you could know His great love for you.

Here’s my challenge to you. Spend as much time as you need, months or years. Dive into Luke 15 and the passages listed above and ask God, “Show me Your love for me; help me to understand and feel Your love for me.”