Emerging From The Desert

On April 20, 1994, Mauro Prosperi came limping out of a desert in Algeria half-dead. Just a week and a half earlier, he’d set out on the Marathon des Sables, a 155-mile race through the Sahara Desert. On the fourth day, a violent sandstorm threw him off course. He’d spend the next ten days fighting for his life. When he finally emerged, he had severe organ damage and weighed less than a hundred pounds. It would take him two full years to recover.

His feels like a story I can strangely relate to.

Over the last couple of years, my wife Megan and I emerged from a desert of our own. We came out bruised, bloodied and soiled. We had sand in our scars and wounds that were still fresh. At first glance, we looked like people "who'd been through some stuff." And truthfully, we felt a lot worse than we looked.

Several years earlier, we had set out to plant a family of microchurches in a new city. We'd spent most of our adult lives planting churches. This, however, would be unlike anything we'd done previously. We were excited about the challenge before us. We couldn't wait to see what God was going to do.

So we set out to do the work of a church planter.

Our hearts were drawn to an area that was under-resourced and under-served. We moved in. Studied. Prayed. Embedded ourselves in the community. Showed up. Served. Hosted. Listened to the stories of our neighbors. Learned everything we could. We asked what good news might sound and look like there, in that place, to those people.

We put together a plan. Raised funds. Partnered with a local church eager to start something in the area. Gathered a team of 75 or so. Prepared as best we could. And eventually, we launched!

Then just weeks later...COVID hit.

The Years We Don’t Usually Talk About

Like so many others, we weren't ready for it. Not financially. Not relationally. Not in any kind of way.

The long months that followed all but decimated the work.

The plan was obliterated. Our team began to scatter. Our sending church suddenly pulled all of their funding without warning.

By the time bans lifted and we were able to finally meet together, we hardly looked like the community we’d been when we set out. What followed was years of rebuilding. In some ways, it felt like a total restart.

I saw a lot of friends step out of vocational ministry during this season. And I fully understood their reasons for doing so.

There were also the unique challenges of living and ministering in an area marked by things like generational brokenness, homelessness, opioid addiction, and many of the things that come with it. We lost friends. Teachers. Persons of Peace. Some of the neighbors we'd invested so heavily in were imprisoned or displaced.

By this time, I was working full-time in the marketplace to make it possible to keep doing the work. Then the company Megan and I both worked for was bought out and they started cleaning house. We both lost our jobs.

Toss an unforeseen medical emergency on top and we very quickly found ourselves upside-down financially. My part-time salary from the church wasn't enough to put food on the table.

Any of these might have been survivable on its own. All of them at once nearly wasn’t.

Truthfully, it was during this time that I got really, really close to leaving vocational ministry for good.

A big part of me wanted to. I questioned whether I had anything left to offer.

It was years of what felt like perpetual struggle, constant loss, lots of failure, and small (sometimes barely-discernable) wins along the way.

The work was slow and unimpressive. Most days I wondered if we were making any real difference at all. However, as hard as it was to see, inch by inch, we were taking ground.

By the time we got five or six years in, I could finally say our community looked something like we had prayed and worked so hard for. God had raised up kingdom laborers in our midst and brought in others to join in the work. The right people were in the room. Microchurches were growing and multiplying. We had new stories to tell.

Thank GOD.

The only problem was...by this point Megan and I were a shell of ourselves. We continued to choose faithfulness each day, but it felt more and more like we were having to war with ourselves to do it.

In reality, we were...

Exhausted. Disappointed. Angry. Hurt. Numb.

We were the kind of burned out that no extended vacation or sabbatical could fix.

In time, we would hand off leadership to a dear friend who had become my co-pastor in the work. To this day, that work is in good hands and doing well. But it would take some time for us to be able to say the same about us.

The desert can do that to a person. And we'd been there a long time.

We'd spent so many long days with our heads down, shielding ourselves against the wind, focused only on putting one foot in front of the other that we hardly noticed our emergence from the wilderness. Even when we began to see signs of life, we were skeptical.

But slowly, little by little, we made it out. The fog eventually started to lift. We slowly began to feel the wind of the Spirit in our hearts again. We started to feel the strange feeling of hope once more.

We had survived.

That experience of healing and emergence has been the last 3 years of our journey. And I think I can say it's taken just about all of it to fully get back to good.

Encouragement For Those Stuck In The Desert

I share all of this for a couple of different reasons. The first is simply to write and reflect. Putting things into words forces one to reflect on what took place and to make abstract feelings and thoughts a bit more concrete. There's power in naming what you've experienced. I have found this to be deeply therapeutic. And helpful. Maybe even healing.

The second reason I share this is to encourage those who find themselves in the desert right now.  Very few know just how hard the last several years were on us and how close we were to quitting. Some, I think, assume our journey has been forever up and to the right. Nope. Far from it. I said we emerged, but in fact, we still have days that are hard.

The way out of the desert is not instantaneous.

It's a process. Sometimes a really long one.

But I promise you this:

No matter what season you find yourself in right now, God is not far off.

He has not abandoned you.

And this won’t last forever.

On the other side of our own desert experience, the impossible has happened: we have fallen back in love with ministry. Both of us.

Megan is discipling a group of wild middle school girls. I am pastoring a community we dearly love and discipling men who are trying to live a better story. We are leading groups together and hosting lots people in our home again.

In short, we are back to being us.

Only better.

Because we've come from the desert.

Every little blessing we now recognize as a sacred gift. Our word last year was "THANKFUL." Not because we chose it in January, but because we just couldn't stop saying it all year long. We just kept saying to each other and anyone who would listen, "We are so incredibly thankful."

I have more to share but for now I’ll just say this:

Wherever you find yourself in this season, friend, hang in there.

Life can be really hard. Deserts don’t last forever. And God is really good.

You can take that to the bank.