Taming the wilderness. This post seems to be coming out a little late, but that’s only because I’m around Yellowstone with my family. It’s a beautiful place, alive with a rustic, untamed feel to the place. Coming from D.C., it’s startling the contrast between here and home. It’s foreign, but I can’t help thinking this is more of what God meant when He started creating.

I’ve been here before. I was here four years ago, so this is not an altogether unfamiliar place, yet it is completely. Along with the immense beauty of this place, there are thick undertones of that wilderness being tamed. There are majestic beasts never meant to have to be concerned with being hit by a speeding vehicle crossing a prairie or constricted in its roaming by a wood and metal fence.

Those animals are like my soul. My heart was never meant to be constricted and confined in the ways I allow and society encourages. I long to roam free, but not in a prairie. My heart’s prairie is the love of my God and Savior. I see peaks and I feel my depths cry out to witness the majestic peaks of God’s glory. I see rivers and I know those to be God’s cleansing blood shed on the cross. While I may physically trek to and fro on a whim, my heart is not.

Dying inside. Everyday, every single day that I am not living freed in the love of God, my heart is dying. Perpetually, I am falling more and more into a deep slumber. Maybe this sounds metaphoric, but only because the truth of the death I feel inside is too painful to describe in detail. If physical death is excruciating, this death of my soul is a thousand times worse.

We’re meant for life. Our hearts were only meant to feel freed when they were able to roam the never ending plains of God’s abundant love. We were meant to be free to scale the heights of His glory and dip in the refreshing waters of His forgiveness. But, to get there takes time. Only He knows the way and we have to be patient to allow Him to lead us there in His good time.

Roam free, my friends. You were always created to do so, but our hearts will not be content just anywhere. The world will tell us that place is success and wealth, but those only lead to discontent and death. Like the animals here, our territory of choice within the expanse of God’s love will look different as the bear chooses a different habitat generally from the bison. You have a specific purpose and place within His love, so go on and find it. Live free and quit taming the wilderness.