What the Wilderness Season Is Building in You

Endurance, character, and hope — in that order, according to Romans 5. The wilderness also builds dependence, because provision arrives daily rather than in a stockpile. None of it is automatic. The same season that forms one man hardens another, and the difference is what he does inside it.

"We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance." — Romans 5:3 (NLT)

This journal guide is part of the The 10X Freedom Path.

Nobody wants this chapter of the argument, and it is worth stating the caution before making it. Telling a suffering man what his suffering is accomplishing is a good way to be useless to him, and it is not the first thing to say.

But it is a true thing, and at some point in a long wait a man starts asking whether any of it is producing anything at all. Scripture answers that question specifically enough to be checkable.

The sequence Paul gives

"And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation." — Romans 5:4 (NLT)

Paul lays out an order, and the order matters. Trials produce endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope. Each stage is the raw material for the next, which means there is no route to the third that skips the first.

Note what he does not claim. He does not say the trials are good, that you should want them, or that they will be brief. He says they produce something, and that the something is worth having.

Endurance: the capacity to stay

The first thing built is unglamorous. It is the ability to keep doing right when the reward has not arrived and there is no evidence it will.

A man who has only ever operated in seasons with visible returns does not know what he does without them. He may be disciplined; he has not been tested. Endurance is what you have after you have kept showing up through a stretch where showing up produced nothing you could point to.

The marker: are you still keeping the daily obediences with no external reinforcement? That is not a small thing. That is the first thing being built.

Character: what is left when performance is removed

A wilderness strips the things a man has been using as a substitute for character — the title, the momentum, the results that made him feel like himself. What remains when those are gone is the actual man.

This is uncomfortable and it is the point. Most men discover in a waiting season that some of what they took for character was actually success. Patience that was really things going well. Generosity that was really surplus. Faith that was really a good run.

The marker: how are you treating people who cannot do anything for you right now, in a season where nothing is going your way? That answer is character, and it is being formed in real time.

Dependence: the manna lesson

"The people can go out each day and pick up as much food as they need for that day." — Exodus 16:4 (NLT)

Israel in the desert received food daily and could not store it — anything hoarded spoiled by morning. That was not a logistical constraint. It was a curriculum, and it ran for forty years.

The lesson was that provision comes from a Person on a daily basis, not from a stockpile you control. A man with six months of runway does not need to trust anyone. A man with today’s portion learns something the other man cannot learn on his schedule.

Hope: the last thing, and the hardest to see

Paul puts hope at the end of the chain, which means it is not the fuel for the season — it is the product of it. That is why trying to manufacture hope in month two of a wait feels like lying. It has not been built yet.

The hope that comes out the other side is a different substance from optimism. Optimism is a forecast about circumstances. Hope, in Paul’s usage, is confidence in a Person that has now survived a season where circumstances gave it nothing to stand on. That version cannot be acquired in a good year.

It is not automatic

The honest caveat. The same wilderness that formed Joshua and Caleb hardened an entire generation that came out of Egypt with them. The desert does not do this to a man by itself.

What separates the two is roughly what this whole journal is about: whether he keeps the daily obediences, stays in community, tells the truth about where he is, and keeps talking to God — including the complaints. The season supplies the conditions. The man supplies the response.

Let's get to work.