Song 8:5 ¶ “Who is this coming up from the wilderness
Leaning on her beloved?”
This is one of my favorite verses because it is so relevant to one lives. There are a number things that I believe it is important to notice. First, the wilderness is a reality, and all of us have to walk through it from time to time. It usually comes out of nowhere, but not always, it’s wrapped up in various kind of circumstances, and it is always painful. Second, you WILL come up out of that difficult place. There is an afterwards. When you are in pain, you can barely remember feeling good, and you think you’ll never feel good again. Trust me, it won’t last forever. Third, in that difficult place, God wants you to seek Him and discover, in that place of suffering, His affection and tenderness at a level you’ve may have never known before. He simply wants, in the wilderness, to become your BELOVED. Often, in those places where He is all we’ve got, He becomes all we need. Fourth, in that crucible of love, you learn to lean on the One who has more deeply become your Beloved. In the wilderness, we learn to live by faith, because His presence and promises is all we’ve got. It’s there, that we really learn to trust Him because we can’t even trust our own feelings. He becomes your great hope and reality in that place of darkness and confusion. Fifth, and finally, He transforms us as we walk through the wilderness places. They said about her, “Who is this coming up from the wilderness.” They almost didn’t recognize her. She had changed so much. She didn’t seem like the same person. She was so intimate with the One on whose breast she was leaning on. She seemed to be walking in a peace that only someone of faith, someone who had learned to lean, could experience. She had not just survived the dark place, she had come out of it a new creation, something different, deep, other. She had come up a Lover, and a Leaner