The God of the Wilderness
Post 20 in the Peaceful Resistance Series
Faith After the Fire
When the Fire Burns It All Down
You don’t forget the moment it breaks.
The moment the place that once felt sacred becomes unbearable.
When the words you used to pray feel like someone else’s script.
It might be a sermon that turns cruel.
A leader who gets protected, not held accountable.
A moment when the truth in your gut finally grows louder than their rules.
You tried to stay.
You tried to obey.
You tried to forgive and be the bigger person.
But staying would have meant disappearing.
So you left.
And they called it rebellion.
They called it weakness.
They called it sin.
But they never asked what they had done to burn it all down.
The Wilderness Is Not a Punishment
They told us the wilderness was a consequence.
A punishment. A place of wandering, of being lost.
But they forgot:
The wilderness is where prophets are born.
Where liberation begins.
Where the divine voice speaks—not from the temple—but from the fire, the wind, the silence.
Moses didn’t meet God in Pharaoh’s palace.
He met God in the desert.
Elijah didn’t find God in the earthquake.
He found Him in a whisper—after he ran for his life.
Even Jesus, before his public ministry, went to the wilderness.
Not as punishment.
But as preparation.
The wilderness isn’t where faith dies.
It’s where false gods fall away.
You Are Not Lost—You Are Free
They’ll say you’ve walked away from God.
But maybe you’ve just walked away from the performance.
From the manipulation.
The hierarchy.
The fear-based control system that called itself church.
Maybe you haven’t lost your faith.
Maybe you’ve finally stopped faking it.
You are not lost.
You are not backsliding.
You are not in rebellion.
You are shedding what never fit you.
You are peeling off the shame.
You are becoming honest.
You are learning to recognize the presence of God
outside the building,
outside the system,
outside the script they told you was the only way.
What the Wilderness Teaches
The wilderness doesn’t offer quick answers.
But it gives you something better: space to breathe.
To question.
To rebuild.
You learn to listen to your own soul.
To trust the small voice inside—the one that was silenced for so long.
You realize that reverence can rise in a sunrise,
that communion can happen around a kitchen table,
that prayer can sound like a cry, a laugh, or complete silence.
You begin to see that sacredness was never limited to a sanctuary.
It was always in you.
Faith After the Fire
If your faith returns, it will be different.
Less about rules.
More about love.
Less about fear.
More about freedom.
You won’t need to perform for anyone’s approval.
You won’t need to sacrifice your truth to feel safe.
Because now, you’ve seen that the God of the wilderness
is bigger than the God they tried to contain.
And that is holy.
NEXT - Your Doubt Is Not a Sin
