48. What Grows in Dry Ground | Why the Desert Is Where God Roots You Deepest

Can anything good actually grow in your hardest season? This episode says yes, and shows you where to look.

There's a tree in the Kalahari Desert called the Shepherd's Tree. It survives where almost nothing else can, green in ground that kills green. For years no one could explain it, until well-drillers digging for water hit its roots more than 200 feet down, the deepest root system of any plant on earth. It didn't grow those roots in spite of the desert. It grew them because of it.

That's what your dry season is doing to you, underground, where you can't see it and can't feel it.

This is part three of the four-part Wilderness Arc, and it's for the believer convinced that nothing is growing, that God has gone silent, that this hard season is wasted, or that they're too numb to feel Him working at all. We start with the person who can't feel a thing, and we don't leave them. Then we go to Jeremiah 17 and the tree whose roots reached the water before the drought ever came. To the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt, who said the wilderness "did not make them holy, it made them honest." To what has to die in the dry ground, the performing self, the version of you that only works when someone's watching. And with Howard Thurman's picture of the "deep river" of faith that survives from the inside out, we name the roots, the honesty, and the unshakeable interior that only a drought can grow.

We also get practical: what desert faithfulness actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, when you feel nothing and do the small, honest, unwitnessed thing anyway.

It hurts. It is not wasted. Both are true.

Scripture: Jeremiah 17:7-8, Matthew 19:21.

If it's the waiting itself wearing you down, my book The Purpose in the Pause goes where this episode couldn't.

This episode discusses spiritual struggle, numbness, and despair with honesty and care.

Share it with someone in their own dry season, leave a review, and follow the show for the rest of the Wilderness Arc.

Connect with us via our Instagram: @faithformed_pod

Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

Order your copy of my latest book, "The Purpose in the Pause", here

Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

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I want to tell you about a tree that shouldn't exist. It grows in the Kalahari Desert, which is one of the harshest, driest places on the face of the earth where the heat is punishing and the rain barely comes, and the ground is like the kind of cracked, bone-dry, hostile that kills almost anything that tries to live in it. And yet, there it stands. Evergreen. Green in a place built to kill green. Alive in ground that should have finished it long, long ago. It's called the Shepherd's Tree. And for the longest time, nobody could explain it. Because up top, it's not even that impressive. It only grows to about 30 feet, and usually a good bit shorter than that. You'd walk right past it, honestly. There's no water on the surface for it to drink, no stream close to it, no rain to speak of, nothing up top that should be able to help it sustain a living, right? So how was this short, unremarkable tree not just surviving, but thriving in a desert that kills almost everything else? And then one day, some people drilling wells for groundwater found out by accident. They were digging down, looking for water deeper and deeper into the earth. And what they kept hitting farther down than they ever expected were roots. This tree's roots, they they followed them down and down, and it turns out the roots of the shepherd's tree go down as far as 68 meters. Y'all, that's over 200 feet. Straight down. It is the deepest root system of any plant ever recorded on planet Earth. Now, do the math on that with me. The tree only gets to about 30 feet tall on a good day, yet its roots go down over 200 feet. This tree is seven times deeper than it is tall. Almost everything about it, the part the the part that matters, the part keeping it alive is underground where you can't see a single inch of it. And here's the thing I need you to understand. The shepherd's tree didn't grow these roots in spite of the desert. It grew them because of it. If you planted that same tree in a soft, wet, easy ground, it would never go down like that. I mean, why would it? The water would be right there on the surface, it would stay shallow and comfortable, shallow rooted, and the first real drought that ever came would kill it. Kill it dead. The only reason that tree can stand in a place that kills things is that a desert once forced its roots down to a depth easy ground would never have demanded. The drought didn't stunt it, the drought is the entire reason that this tree is unkillable. Now sit up. Because I'm about to say the thing that this entire episode is built on. You are the shepherd's tree. And the dry season that you are so desperate to escape is doing the exact same thing in you. Right now, underground, where you can't see it and you can't feel it. Because here's the lie, and nearly all of us believe this. We look at the desert and we think nothing grows here. Because that's what it looks like on the surface. Sand to the horizon, cracked ground, you know, a sky that hasn't rained in longer than we can remember. Just barren, empty, nothing dead. And we stare at the surface of our dry season and decide it's a wasted stretch, a dead place, a season where growth stopped and God went quiet and nothing at all is happening. But that is a lie your eyes tell you, because some of the most important things in your entire life are growing in ground exactly that dry at a depth you can't see for reasons you won't understand until years from now, when the real heat comes and you don't fall, and you finally realize where the roots came from. This is Faithformed episode 48. Welcome, we're glad to have you. And this is a podcast about honest faith for people who don't have it all together. We're trying to build a faith for the middle. And today, in part three of our wilderness arc, I want to take you underground. I want to show you the thing nobody believes until they've lived it. That the desert is not where things die. It's where the deepest kind of thing finally grows. The kind that could never have survived anywhere else. The kind that will one day be the only reason that you're still standing. And I don't think it's an accident that the deepest rooted tree on the entire planet is named after a shepherd. So don't you look at that dry ground and call it dead. Look closer. Something is growing down there. And today I want to show you what it is. But before we get to the rest of the episode, if you're enjoying Faith Formed, if you're liking our content, do me a favor and leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. It means a lot to me personally, and it also provides credibility for people who are looking for podcasts like this to help them in their faith journey. Now let's get into it. Now, before I say one word about growth, I have to talk to somebody specific. Because if I don't, then I think the rest of this episode is going to sail right over the person who needs it most. Okay? And here's that thing. It's that some of you can't feel a thing. You're gonna hear me talk about roots going down and honesty forming and God doing deep work under the surface. And a part of you is going to go, that's nice. That sounds really good. Justin, you have a great audio voice, but I can't feel any of that. I can't feel God, I can't feel growth, I can't feel anything but tired. I can't feel anything but empty. And every time somebody tells me to trust that it's happening under the surface, I just want to scream. Because I have been trusting the invisible for months, for years, for decades, and y'all, I've got nothing to show for it, Jay. And I'm running out of whatever it is that lets a person keep believing in what they can't see. Fair. If that's you, I want you to know that I'm not talking past you in this episode. I'm not. I'm talking directly to you. This whole episode is for you more than for anyone. Because here's the thing about roots the plant can't feel the roots growing either. Down in the dark, the deepest work is happening precisely where the plant has no awareness of it at all. Growth underground is by definition growth that you can't feel. So if you can't feel it, then you are not the exception to this episode. Rather, you might be the clearest example of this episode. And so the numbness you're reading as proof that nothing's happening is the exact condition that roots grow in, in the silence, in the hiddenness, below the reach of your feelings and your facts. So don't check out. Please don't check out because you can't feel what I'm describing. The not feeling is not disqualifying. In the desert, it's almost the point. So stay with me. Let me show you what's growing, even in you, especially in you. Even though, especially though, you can't feel a thing. So let me start underground, because that's where the real work of the desert happens, and it's the part that you can't see. Here's something about plants that changes how you read your whole dry season, or it should change how you see your whole dry season. When a plant has easy access to water, when it rains all the time and the surface stays wet, the roots stay shallow. I mean, why would they dig, right? Everything they need is right there on top. But put that same plant in a dry, arid place where the water is deep and scarce and hard to access, and the roots do something desperate and beautiful. They go down. They drive deeper and deeper, searching because the only water that exists is far below the surface. The desert plant has the deepest roots, not in spite of the drought, but because of it. Now, let's flip this spiritually. Because it's the whole it's the whole point of all this, right? This is not a horticultural podcast. We're talking about spiritual, faithful things. In the green seasons, when when when God's provision is obvious and everything's flowing, and you can feel him easily, your roots stay shallow. You don't need to dig because he's right there on the surface. But in the wilderness where we've been camped the last two weeks, right? Where God feels far and the provision is scarce, and you have to reach, yo, that's where your roots will finally go down. That's where you develop a depth in God that you would never have developed in the good times, because you never would have needed to. Look at Jeremiah 17, verses 7 and 8. Jeremiah writes, Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord. They will be like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes, its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought. Read that carefully. See, the tree isn't spared the heat, neither is it spared the drought. The heat comes and the drought comes, but the tree doesn't fear because its roots already went down to the stream. And when did these roots go down? They went down in the seasons of reaching. The tree that survives the drought is the tree that learned to root deep before the drought ever came. And often it learned it during an earlier drought or an earlier season of lack. So if you feel like you're reaching right now, uh you're straining or digging, searching for a God who feels further away than what he used to, don't read that as a decline. That's the reaching of your roots. That's the desert doing the one thing that it is uniquely built to do. Y'all, in the wilderness, the wilderness takes shallow faith and forces it to go down deep to the only water, the only source that was ever going to truly hold you when the real heat came. Y'all, we should be excited that our source, our our water that will that will never thirst again, is not just on the surface, but it's also down deep. Because there are gonna come seasons in our lives where we're gonna have to dig. You're gonna have to dig below your mama's prayers, below your grandmama's prayers. You're gonna have to dig and find the source for yourself. Because it's only when you find the source for yourself that you begin to get the kind of nourishment that is reserved only for your kind of tree. Now I need to stop because I'm getting a groove going. I need to stop for a second because I can feel like I feel myself, I want to rush. I want to rush toward the good news, but I'm not gonna do that yet. Because if I move too fast to, you know, oh look what's growing, hallelujah! Look what's growing in you, hallelujah, in the dry season, hallelujah. No, no, no. If I rush to what we normally assume is the payoff, then I'll have walked you past how much this actually hurts, and you'd be right to stop trusting me, right? Because I'm not giving you the real, honest, transparent thing that I've always tried to do with this podcast. So let me just say it plainly with no reframe. The desert is the desert is brutal. The desert is it's brutal. It's brutal. It's the season you didn't choose, and you also don't have a button to end it. It is praying into silence, it is watching the people around you flourish in the green while you stand in the sand with no shoes, and the bottom of your feet have become numb to the burn of the sand under you. It is the exhaustion of hoping that today is the day when you wake up and going to bed that night saying, dang, maybe it's tomorrow. It's it's having the hope come back empty until you're almost afraid to hope again because the disappointment costs you too much. It's the loneliness of a struggle that nobody else around you seems to see. It's the specific ache of doing everything right and still ending up here. And it's the fear, the quiet 3 a.m. fear that maybe this is just your life right now. That maybe the green is never coming back, that maybe you misjudged God or you read scripture wrong or he forgot you or you did something to earn this, and you'll never figure out what. And I'm not I'm not gonna pretend any of that away. I'm not. Because I feel like in some ways I'm in that wilderness right now, and so I feel many of those things very up close and personally. So I can't pretend because I'm I'm experiencing this even as I'm talking to you about it. Like if I told you the desert was secretly wonderful, I'd be lying. And I think we've had way too much lying about how hard things are by dressing them up in biblical verses. Even the people in the Bible didn't dress up the hurt, they were honest about it. The wilderness is not a secretly wonderful land, it is genuinely hard. And your instinct that it's hard is not a lack of faith, it's just you being honest. But here's the thing that I will say against the hardness, and I want to say this gently hard and hopeless are not the same thing. This is hard, but it's not hopeless. And the difference between those two is the entire reason that I'm making this episode, because there is something happening in the hardness that is not the hardness itself. Let me show you what it is. I want to take you to some people who did something almost incomprehensible. They went into the desert on purpose. So in the third and fourth centuries, after Christianity became legal and comfortable and socially acceptable in the Roman Empire, a group of Christian men and women looked at how soft the faith had become, and they walked out into the Egyptian desert to find God in the barrenness. We call them the desert fathers and the desert mothers. The most famous, Antony of Egypt, who was an African man, a Coptic Christian, heard the words of Jesus to the rich young man in Matthew 19, verse 21, where Jesus told him to sell what you have and follow me. And Antony took that and walked into the wilderness and stayed. And thousands of people followed him into the sand. Now, I'm not telling you that to give you a history lesson. I'm telling you because of one thing they discovered that I need you to have, and I need me to have, because it explains what's happening to you right now. There's a line that comes down to us about these desert Christians, and when I read it, it stayed with me, and I think it finally fits in this episode. The desert did not make them holy, it made them honest. Again, the desert did not make them holy, it made them honest. And here's why that's about you and me, and not just about the fourth century. In the city, in the comfort in the crowd, you can hide. Put a person alone in the silence, and we finally come face to face with what's actually inside of us. When the heart is stripped of distraction, uh, one of their sayings goes, the truth of the soul is revealed. And in your wilderness, this is what's happening right now. Whatever else your wilderness is doing, it's stripping the distraction so that the truth of your soul gets revealed. All the noise that you used to, that you used to keep from looking at yourself, the busyness, uh, the momentum, the people to impress, the sermons to preach, the the offerings to take up, the church vision to cast and to work toward. The desert quiets all of that. And suddenly there you are, and you're alone with what's really in you. The folks that people on the church board don't see, the people, the stuff that the people in your small group or your youth group don't see, the people that, you know, you're the people that you're in ministry with that they don't see. You're you come face to face with yourself and the fears you outran, the idols that you propped up, the resentment that you never dealt with, the parts of you that only come out when there's no one around you to perform for. And this is not pleasant, right? It's not, it's not a pleasant thing to happen to a person. It's exposing. And it can feel like the desert is humiliating you, like dragging out everything you'd worked hard to keep buried. But here's where I have to catch you. Because this is the exact moment that a lot of people get hurt in the wilderness. See, when the wilderness reveals the worst of what's in you, that revelation is not God's verdict about you, it is God's invitation to you to heal. He's not stripping you bare so that he can look at your ugliness and be like, uh, no, thank you. You mm-mm, you too ugly for me, nope. I don't want you. No. He's the wilderness shows it to you because you cannot be healed of what you will not face. And you were never going to face it as long as you had all the distractions and the comfort to keep you hiding. So the honesty is not punishment, the honesty is the beginning of the healing. So when the desert shows you the thing you've been avoiding about yourself, don't run, but also don't drown in shame. Because the shame is not the point. Bring it to God who already knew it was there, who led you somewhere quiet enough to finally deal with it, and who loves the real you far more than he ever loved the performed one. The truth of your soul getting revealed is not the end of you. It's the start of an honest relationship with God. That the hiding would it was never going to turn you aloose enough to have that kind of relationship. Now there are things that die specifically in the dry ground. Because something has to die for the deeper things to grow. What dies in the desert is the performing self, the version of you that runs on being seen. The you that needs the crowd, the applause, the platform, the momentum, the visible evidence that you matter. And I'm gonna put myself right firmly in the crosshairs, right? I'm gonna put Justin right there. Because I want you, I don't want you to be like Justin. I want you to be, I want, I want you to be better than Justin. My performing self got down when none of my books sold a huge amount of copies. My performing self sometimes wants to get down when podcast episodes don't perform the way that I want them to perform. My performing self wants to be seen, wants to be affirmed, wants to be confirmed, wants people to look at me and say, Oh yeah, the hand of God is upon you. Yeah. And in the green season, that self thrives. When people are leaving ratings and reviews, oh yeah, that performing self, it thrives. Because there is an audience and there's fruit, there is something tangible that we can look at that I can look at and say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, God, we did our big one. Yeah, God, I did my big one on this one, God, yeah, yeah, yeah. Folks are loving the book. You had me right, God. Yeah, we did our big one with that, man. Look, the money's rolling in, the reviews are rolling in, the life change is rolling in. Oh yeah, God, yeah, we got something. But the wilderness has no audience. Nobody's watching you be faithful in the desert. There's no applause for how well you're trusting God when no one can see you do it. And that's exactly the point. See, the wilderness kills the part of you that was doing all of this for the eyes and the approval of everybody else. It has to, because a faith that only works when someone's watching was never gonna survive the seasons when no one is. And almost everyone has more of that performing self baked in them than they realized. And then the wilderness exposes it. You find out how much of your faith was actually for an audience the moment the audience disappears, and you have to decide whether you'll still seek God, whether you'll still read the Bible, when there's absolutely no one around to be impressed by it. And this is where I need to draw a careful line, because this connects to something that I've written about, but it's not the same thing. I I wrote a book called The Purpose and the Pause. Um, and that book is about the waiting and what happens and what it means to steward the seasons of stillness and delay when God has you holding and you don't understand why. If the waiting itself is what's breaking you right now, then the sheer length of the delay, then that book is for you. And I'd point you there because I couldn't fit all of it into one episode, and the pause deserves its own full treatment. And I even did an episode about it far back, so check the episodes and you can go back and listen to that episode. But the wilderness is a different animal from the pause, and I want to keep them distinct. The pause is about stillness, but the wilderness is about formation under pressure. See, the pause asks, can you wait? The wilderness asks, who are you becoming while you are being stripped? If the pause is the bench, then the wilderness is the active march. And what I'm talking about right now, the death of the performing self, that is wilderness work. It is the active, painful, grinding demolition of the false self while God keeps moving you forward through ground you'd never have chosen for yourself. But both matter. But right now in the desert, the thing being killed is the you that needed to be seen. And we're not gonna funeralize it because its death is not a tragedy, it's the most freeing thing that I think will ever happen to any of us. So I want to bring in a voice here, because you know every episode I bring in theologians. I want to bring in a voice that understood what actually grows in a person when everything on the surface has been stripped away. Howard Thurman, a favorite of this podcast, a black theologian, a pastor, mystic, not in the you know, witchy kind of sense, no, but in the thinker kind of sense, uh, who I think is one of the great spiritual minds of the 20th century, the man whose book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have carried with him. Thurman spent his life thinking about how people who live, in his words, with their backs against the wall, the oppressed, the dispossessed, the ones with every external thing stripped away from them, how those people not only survive but keep their souls intact. And his answer was that survival for the disinherited is never about external circumstances changing. Rather, it's about something on the inside going get this deep enough to hold. Thurman wrote about what he called the deep river of faith. He said, a faith rooted in that deep river will help a person overcome. And then he described the river like this. It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks. But at last, the river must answer the call to the sea. That's the inner life he's describing. Something down deep in a person, deeper than circumstance, deeper than what's been taken from them. A river that keeps moving toward God, no matter how many rocks are thrown in its path. And here's why Thurman matters so much for this conversation, and why I chose his voice for this specifically. He understood, right, from a community of African Americans that new generational desert, real desert, not metaphorical, that the thing which keeps you alive when everything external is stripped away is never external. It's the interior rootedness in God that the stripping itself produces. Thurman said the goal of the life of Jesus was to help the disinherited change from within so they'd be empowered to survive from the inside out. From the inside out. That's the desert's gift. It builds in you an inner life so rooted, so deep in God that it can survive anything the outside world does to it, because it was never depending on the outside world in the first place. And that's what grows in the dry ground. Not the shallow surface faith that needs everything to be going well. The deep river faith. The kind that has learned to answer the call to the sea, even when it's stumbling over an infinite series of hindering rocks and twists and turns, and you don't build that in the green. You don't build that in the rainforest. You build it in the drought where you have no choice but to go down to the deep river, to the deep source, because the surface has nothing left to give you. Now let me get practical, because I've said a lot of true things about roots and rivers and honesty. And if I leave it all up there in the sky, you'll nod and you'll wake up tomorrow with no idea of what to do with any of this. So I want to bring it down to ground level. What does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday in the desert? It looks like small things. Things that we think are almost embarrassed, embarrassingly small. That's the first thing to understand. Desert faithfulness is not dramatic because there's no audience to be dramatic for. It's quiet and it's daily, and it's the kind of thing nobody would ever make a movie about. Trust me. I don't think anybody would. So here's what it looks like: it looks like getting up and saying one honest sentence to God before the day starts. Not a performance, not an ugly cry, worship face, prayer, just the truth. Like, I don't feel you, God, but I'm here anyway. That's rooting. That one sentence said into silence with no feeling behind it is a root that's going down. You may say, God, I'm frustrated with you right now. You may say, God, I'm angry with you right now. You may say, God, why? God, how long, God? How long do I have to deal with this, God? Why is this taking so long? Whatever that looks like for you, can I challenge you? Can I urge you to say it? So it also looks like catching yourself reaching for the old distraction. The phone, the person, the busyness, the thing you use to avoid being alone with yourself. And once in a while, just not reaching for it. Letting the quiet come. And I know we are so afraid of the quiet, but let the quiet come. Letting the desert do its honest work for five minutes instead of just drowning it out with the noise of life. That's the stripping. It looks like doing the next right thing with nobody watching. Showing up for your family, your work, your responsibilities faithfully when there is no applause for it and no fruit you can see and no evidence that it matters. That's a performing self-dying, one unwitnessed act at a time. And it looks like telling one person, one safe person, the truth about where you actually are. Not the I'm fine that you give everybody else, but the real thing. Because the desert makes you honest, because it rubs you raw. And the honesty was never meant to stay locked inside of you. That's the deep river that's finding another channel. None of that feels like much on the day you do it. And that's the point. Roots don't announce themselves. There's not a there's a root, no. You won't feel that growth on a Tuesday or a Monday or a Wednesday. You'll just do the small, quiet, unwitnessed, honest thing, and then you do it again on Wednesday, then on Thursday, then on Friday, and the growth will be happening the whole time underground where you can't see it. Faithfulness in the desert isn't a feeling. It's a series of small honest acts you do without evidence. And looking back years from now, you'll realize that those, those things were the root. So let me tell you what you're actually growing in your dry season, because I think you deserve to know that it's not wasted. You're growing roots that go down to water most people will never reach, because most people never had to. You're growing an honesty about yourself that the comfortable never develop because comfort let them keep hiding. You're growing the death of the performing self, which is the birth of your real self, a you that seeks God whether anyone's watching or not. And you're growing Thurman's deep river, an interior life that is so rooted in God that it can survive anything because it stopped depending on circumstances a long time ago, in a desert where circumstances gave it nothing. None of that grows in the green. It just doesn't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, it doesn't. And that's the hard yet holy truth of the wilderness. The thing that will carry you the rest of your life, the deep roots, the honesty, the freedom from the crowd, the unshakable interior, those are the fruit of the desert. They don't grow in easy soil. They require the drought. And that means the very dryness you've been begging God to end is the exact condition producing the thing you'll need most for everything that comes after. And I'll say it one more time to the person I started with, the one who can't feel a thing. All of that is growing in you too. It is. It's not just in the people who can feel God working, but it's in you, the one who's numb, who's tired, the one who's been trusting the invisible with nothing to show for it. The roots don't need your attention to grow. They don't need your feelings to grow. They're gonna go down right now in the dark, in the drought, whether or not one ounce of it registers with you, your inability to feel the growth is not evidence against growth. It's just what growing in the dark feels like from the inside. Now hear me clearly, because I I can't tie this up too neatly, because this is not neat. None of what I said makes the desert pleasant. None of what's growing in you means that the desert is pleasant. Knowing your roots are going down doesn't make this hurt any less. The honesty of the desert forces is painful, it hurts. The death of the performing self feels like an actual funeral. Because it is one. And I'm not telling you it doesn't hurt, I'm telling you that it's not wasted. And those are two completely different claims. And the wilderness lives in the gap between them. It hurts, and it is not wasted. Both are true. So I need you to hold those two things honestly in your heart. Next week we close this arc and we talk about coming out of the wilderness, about what it means to finally walk out, the one thing you carry out with you that could have only begotten by staying in the wilderness. But before you can carry anything out, it has to grow in you first. And it's growing right now down in the dark, in the dry ground, whether you can see it or not. Feelings can be false. Okay? So here's your charge. And I want you to take it down into the dry ground with you. Stop believing the lie that nothing is growing just because you can't see it or feel it. The most important growth of your life is happening underground right now, in the dark, in the exact dryness you keep begging God to end. So tomorrow morning, say the one honest sentence, even if you feel nothing when you say it. Let the quiet come instead of drowning it out. Do the next right thing with nobody watching. Tell one safe person the truth about where you are. Let your roots grow down deep to the water, to the deep water. Because that's the only water that will hold you when the real heat comes. Let the desert make you honest. Let it kill your performing self. Don't drown in shame. Don't drown in shame. Bring it to the God who already knew and loves the real you anyway. Yeah? Let the performing self die and taste the freedom of a faith that was never for the crowd. And go down to the deep river, the one that keeps moving toward God every day over a hindering rock, because that river is being carved in you right now, and it will carry you for the rest of your life. Remember the shepherd's tree that stands in the Kalahari, green in a place that kills green, alive in the ground that should have finished it. That's you. Right now, in the dry ground, you keep calling dead. You're not out here withering, you're rooting. And one day the real heat is gonna come. The kind that levels those who are shallow rooted and the comfortable, and everyone who only ever grew an easy soil. One day the heat's gonna come and you're not going to fall. You're gonna stand green in a place that kills green, and you're finally going to understand that the wilderness you resented was the making of you. So don't you dare quit. Don't you dare quit. Don't you dare quit the drought right before the roots reach the water. Because you're close. It hurts, but it's not wasted. Both are true. Family, I need you to keep growing in the dark. Let's pray. Father God, we come to you from dry ground. And most of us are convinced that nothing is growing because we can't see anything but sand everywhere. And a lot of us can't feel anything at all. God, for the numb one, the tired one, the one who's been trusting with nothing to show for it, would you do the deepest work of all in them? Precisely where they cannot feel it. Let their inability to feel the growth never be mistaken by them or by us for the absence of that growth. For the one who is reaching, straining, digging for a you that feels further away than you used to, would you show them that the reaching is the rooting and that nothing about this straining is wasted? For the one the desert is made honest, who's being finally forced to see the real them, would you meet them in that honesty with grace instead of condemnation? Remind them that you didn't strip them, that you didn't strip the distraction to shame them. You did it to heal them because you love them and you want them to be whole, and you can't heal what they continue to hide. For the one whose performing self is dying, who's learning the terrible yet freeing lesson of seeking you with no one watching, would you hold them through the death of that performing self and raise up in its place a real self that's rooted, honest, and free in you? And God, for all of us, carve the rip the river, the deep, carve the river deeper. Take us down past the shallow faith into the deep faith that is needed. Let us answer the call to the sea over every hindering rock, over every obstacle, all the way home to you, God. It hurts. But you've promised us in your word that it's not wasted. So we believe both. Help our unbelief. In Jesus' name. Amen. So if you found this, if this found you on a dry ground, convinced that nothing was growing, then you probably know somebody else who's in the same shape. Send this one to them. Sometimes the most hopeful thing that you can tell someone is that the most important growth of their life is happening right now in this season where nothing feels like it's growing, when nothing feels like it's happening, when everything feels dead. Sometimes the most the most important thing they need to hear is that the work is working. The wilderness is wildernessing, the desert is deserting. Let it let it do its thing. Yeah? Be that voice for somebody today. And if faith formed is doing something real in you, the best way to help it reach the next person in the desert is to leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. Takes a minute, and it's genuinely how new people find this in the noise. Then follow or subscribe because next week we close this arc, part four, coming out of the wilderness, and the one thing you carry out that you can only get by going through. One more thing. If it's the waiting itself that's wearing you down, like the sheer length of the delay, I wrote a whole book about that, the purpose and the pause. There's a link in the show notes. Go grab your copy today. Keep growing in the dark. Alright? I'll see you next week. Be blessed.