Through the Desert and Back Again

Happy New Year! I know, it's about a week into it, but it's the thought that counts, right?
So for the last half of winter break I was lonely. I missed my friends of school, and except for a few bright moments with others, I really wanted to be with them. It didn't exactly help my mood when several of them were having amazing experiences with God at a conference that I had wanted to go to. I spent that week moping, complaining to myself and to the Lord (and to a few other poor people) about how lonely and bored I was. I was learning a lot from God, due to the large amounts of time I got to spend with Him and the books I was reading (The Shack and Rees Howells: Intercessor). I was being challenged in a lot of areas, and I knew God was stretching me. Yet I was miserable.
Then I went to New Song church that Saturday night, the weekend before classes started up again. Adam talked about the desert experience, touching on something I had heard from him a few weeks earlier and God had pointed out to me. He used the example of John the Baptist, who God led into the wilderness to prepare for ministry. The Lord took him away from the city, from the "normal" ways of doing church, from other people. He used that time to prepare John the Baptist for his ministry, when the Lord sent the people out to the desert to meet him and learn.
The reminder of this message was something like getting hit by a soccer ball you should have seen and dodged. I knew that I should have seen it all, but somehow I hadn't. That night we were led to make commitments to God to prepare for the revival that He is bringing. The Lord said to me, more or less, "You were in the lonely place, and you despised every minute of it. Now I'm going to lead you right back there, and you are going to learn to love it." He led me to commit to spend 8 hours alone with Him every Sunday. Now I learned after my first Sunday that it was not like God was thinking, "let's see how long you can stay awake and not get frostbite in Tower Chapel." It was more like, "Let's have an 8-hour date every Sunday. You won't be distracted by everyone around you, so I can spend some quality time with just you. I'm going to stretch you and grow you a lot through this, and you're not going to like it at times, and it's going to be exhausting if you do it with your flesh. But it's good."
So this period of time is very challenging, in many ways. It's not always fun, but it's exciting. He's not a safe Lion, but He's good.