Back to Egypt

As I write this, I am still working on The Wilderness Companion. The two most difficult aspects of writing this book have been dealing day after day with the physical attacks as I write while also dealing with the emotional pain of going back through years of past pain. Years of journals scribbled during times of pain so intense I wondered if I would truly ever see the promised land. Years of feeling like my life had completely fallen apart, while watching the lives of those I love disintegrating at the same time. Years of hurting so bad that I sometimes struggled just to keep believing.

The enemy has over the past weeks sent attack after attack against my body. As I write this, I have been in pain for days. I am accustomed to chronic pain, but not at this level. It is the kind of pain that honestly makes you want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head and not come out until the pain has left. But this is the kind of pain that sleeps with you, that awakens you from your dreams to remind you it is still there, and to make it impossible to completely rest.

Weeks ago, the Lord spoke to me during my prayer time about refusing the distractions that were attacking my time and staying focused on writing. You know how it gets when you are trying to complete something for Him, your phone rings and rings, you get 1,000 emails and everything needs to be handled right then. Everyone has an emergency and needs you to pray for them. The enemy relishes taking our time and focus away from whatever the Lord wants us doing. I had been warned weeks earlier those attacks would come.

Okay, Lord. I will turn off my ringers when I'm writing then. But he will just move his attack. What is the next attack I should watch for?


He will attack you in your body.


The next attack came within days and has not ceased since. The enemy attacked in multiple areas at the same time in an attempt to stop me, to put me in bed. And he has weakened my body, but my determination to complete the book has not wavered.

Many nights after writing for hours and hours, the emotional pain of revisiting what I would have preferred to forget is almost overwhelming. One evening last week I had to stop five times during the writing process as tears streamed down my face and wave after wave of grief hit me. On those nights the Lord is my present help in trouble, my comforter. He holds my hand until I regain my composure and can continue.

Lord, do I really have to go back through all those journals to write this book? This is so painful. Does it really have to be done this way? 


Yes. I can heal many through the pain of one. Are you willing?


Yes, Lord. 


Sometimes walking through the desert, the pain of what we walk through is so intense it nearly cripples us. It lands blow after devastating blow until it drops us to our knees and we cry out in pain to the God of all comfort. Though we cannot always see all the reasons why we must face it, we have the solace of knowing He has not left us. He is there quietly at our side in that fiery furnace as the flames climb higher and higher.

A few days after the Lord spoke that to me, I was reading the word and though I have read the story of Exodus over and over and over, I saw something I had never seen before. The first assignment the Lord gave  Moses after he was called, after He spoke to him through the burning bush that He wanted him to free the Israelites from bondage, was to go back into Egypt.

Sometimes in our desert times we are required to be some place we do not wish to be, or we are called to walk with another through their journey as their health fails or they face the death of loved ones or a relationship with a loved one, or as they walk out their final time here on earth. And we hurt with them. We hurt watching them because we love them. And so we face day after day in the presence of their unspeakable agony, loving them through it, to make them feel less alone. We hold their hands, and our hearts weep with them, and in the still of the night, we weep for them and lift up prayers on their behalf. We see the pain of their journeys, as helpless to stop their pain as we were to stop our own, as their lives change in ways they can never change back. And we are as changed by their pain as we have been by our own. And He continues to teach us and give us the treasures of darkness in those days and nights when nothing is well and it feels like the sun will never shine in our hearts again.

Like Moses, sometimes in order to help someone else get free, we must return to Egypt ourselves.