I have longed for Egypt and been given a wilderness

I  realize how selfish some of my prayers have been. Today while reading my devotionals this line came across my heart. “I thank thee that many of my prayers have been refused- I have asked amiss and do not have, I have prayed from lusts and been rejected, I have longed for Egypt and been given a wilderness.”

It was as if a light went on in the middle of the night. This past year has been a struggle to step up to a different level of prayer. I have lots of prayer journals I have done and different ways I have tried to apply prayer to my life. What I have been convicted about this past year is that I ask too much. My prayers are more about supplications than they are about confession and adoration. I get thanks down pretty good. I am very thankful but I realize I am also very greedy. And it’s not always about me- in fact it’s seldom about me. That has always made me feel better about asking God to heal everyone else and meet their needs. However, my focus this year has been a quest for the time I spend simply with God and listening to what He is telling me rather than what I am telling Him. I realize that I am longing for Egypt and find myself in a wilderness and I don’t like it.

This prompted me to refocus my prayer life on Who God is, What He does and How He feels about me long before I start filling the blanks on my page. Egypt is such a beautiful place. The wilderness is barren. But it doesn’t have to be that way if I see it as the beautiful not the barren. Jesus went off in the wilderness to pray. There must have been something about the wilderness that connected Jesus to God in a special way. Moses and the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for many years. I wonder if any of them saw the beauty or did they just see the driftwood and sand dunes.

I am not longing specifically for the wilderness nor have I given up on the Egypt that is in my heart but I am seeing the beauty in the Wilderness and understanding Egypt isn’t ready for me yet. The prayer (taken from the Valley of Vision Prayer Book) also has this line.
“Go on with thy patient work, answering ‘no’ to my wrongful prayers, and fitting me to accept it.”

I think Egypt is the cats meow. God apparently thinks the wilderness is a lesson I need to pass before I reach Egypt. Especially now with the changes in our world, we all want to go back to the Egypts in our hearts.  We want our Egypt- to be with loved ones, go where we want and do what we are used to. For now, we are in a wilderness.  And there is beauty if we look for it!