I feel like a seminary student again. I've been immersed in the Exodus and wilderness stories preparing for an upcoming series. It amazes me how every time I go back to stories I've read multitudes of times, layers fall away and reveal even more wisdom. I have a strong suspicion that since the stories haven't changed, I have, and that growth has made me ready to receive more.

The story that stopped me this week was the scouts. The Israelites were pretty early in their journey from Mt. Sinai, about two years into it. Moses sent twelve scouts into Canaan to assess the land. All twelve scouts made the same journey into Canaan and back. They walked the same ground, encountered the same fortified cities, and stood in the shadow of the same giants. They even brought back the same extraordinary fruit, a single cluster of grapes so heavy it required two people to carry it. They all saw it. And yet ten of them came back and said, "We can't do this." Two of them, Caleb and Joshua, came back and said, "We absolutely can." Same data. Completely different conclusions.

The difference wasn't the land. It was what each scout believed about themselves in relation to the land.

The ten said, "We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes." That phrase has stayed with me all week. In our own eyes. The giants didn't shrink them. They shrunk themselves. And when they reported back to the people, that smallness spread like a fever.

The people weren't ready, because centuries of bondage had settled into their bones. You don't shake a slave identity loose in a season. The wilderness wasn't a punishment for their fear. It was the long (forty years), patient work of unlearning who they had been told they were, so they could become who they were always meant to be.

The wilderness was the curriculum.

Most of us have a promised land we're circling. A relationship we want to be different. A version of ourselves we're reaching toward. A calling we keep approaching but haven't yet entered. And we tend to treat the wilderness as the problem, the delay, the obstacle standing between us and the life we're meant to live.

I now think the wilderness we each encounter grows something in us to prepare us to receive what we desire. What if the waiting, the wandering, the seemingly repetitive terrain forms us to actually be able to receive what's waiting for us? Formation takes the time it takes. God is patient with the process because the destination without the formation is just another Egypt with better scenery.

The land hadn't changed when the next generation finally crossed over. But they had.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you might look at whatever wilderness you're in with a little more curiosity and a little less frustration. Something is being built in you there. The layers are falling away. And when you're ready, more wisdom than you can currently imagine is waiting to be received. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa