The Wilderness Between Who I Was and Who I Am Becoming
The old self feels “safe.”
Familiar routines, familiar rooms, familiar burdens.
Even when those places begin to break us,
something inside whispers,
“This is where I belong… don’t move.”
The new self is “unknown.”
One step forward
and the ground seems to crumble like sand beneath my feet.
The future turns invisible,
and even the word unemployed tightens itself around my chest.
But—
Growth never lives inside the familiar.
It waits beyond the threshold of the unknown.
In the days of the Exodus,
even after Israel escaped Egypt,
the wilderness frightened them.
They murmured again and again,
“Let us go back.”
Yet the wilderness was never a place of ruin—
it was the place where a new people were formed,
where hearts were remade,
where God taught them to walk.
I am standing in my own wilderness now.
The ache of leaving the old self,
the tremor of stepping toward the new—
both press against me at once.
And yet,
guidance has always met me after I stepped forward,
never before.
The promised land
was never hidden inside the safety of what was.
It waits on the far side of trust,
in the unfamiliar,
in the unlit path,
in the self I have not yet become
.