When the Wilderness Becomes Holy Ground

In 2018, Rachel Held Evans wrote about sitting with a friend who had just been told by her church that her questions made her dangerous. The friend wept — not because she had lost her faith, but because the community she loved could not hold the fullness of who she was becoming. Evans said something that stayed: "The wilderness is not punishment. It is where God does some of His most sacred work."

Paul writes in Romans 5:3-5 that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope — a hope that does not disappoint because God's love has been poured into our hearts. But notice what Paul does not say. He does not say suffering is good. He does not say we should seek it or baptize it with false meaning. He says something far more radical: that even in the wreckage, the Spirit is composting something alive.

For those who have been pushed to the margins — by institutions, by theology wielded as a weapon, by systems that protect power over people — this passage is not a call to accept abuse quietly. It is a defiant declaration that exclusion and heartbreak do not get the final word. God meets us in the wilderness, not to explain our suffering, but to walk through it alongside us, transforming grief into solidarity and solidarity into fierce, stubborn hope.

Carry that hope into the world this week. Let your scars become bridges.