“What Happens in the Wilderness?” | Themes (Part 4.1)
This is part 4 of the series “The Place Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide”. See original post here.
COLLISION: Themes
“What Happens in the Wilderness?”
This single question was the prevailing anthem of HOBL. As I eluded, I knew this would be an unpopular question as none of us like to ask it. Even fewer to live the answer.
But with Luscia, Zaethan, Dmitri and crew essentially on the run, marked as outlaws and fleeing to sanctuary in Boreal, that’s essentially where they are headed—into the wilderness. It may be a beautiful, haunting, majestic wilderness…but its a vast unknown. A holding pattern of sorts, as the Quadren is tucked and barred behind a seemingly impenetrably border. They are safe. They are stagnant. They are bound by a foreign political system they do not understand nor can sway.
And they are forced to wait.
At minute mark 26:09 in my recent live Q&A event, I discuss how a local nonprofit explores the idea of a forced wilderness on its students. It’s incredible to see the stark change in previously hopeless young men, for that is always the season of the program where most of their evolution occurs. I wanted this same evolution for our characters. I wanted them to be uncomfortable, not because they were running for their lives, but because they had to stop and look in the mirror day in and day out. Do they like what they find in their reflection? Do others? When the distractions are eliminated, when their hands are tied, there’s no hiding anymore. All that’s left is themselves.
“The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven't yet come to the end of themselves. We're still trying to give orders, and interfering with God's work within us.”
~A.W. Tozer
The trial of the wilderness is an age-old tradition throughout history. Most famously, during the Exodus, when the Hebrews were delivered from slavery out of Egypt and into the desert for forty years. Stripped of everything they knew, every comfort and assurance, they waited. They migrated as tent dwellers. They followed a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, progressing only a few miles at a time. Getting up. Doing it again. There’s a long-held saying that it took one day to get Israel out of Egypt, but 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel—forty years to rid them of what they’d known, how they’d lived, what they’d craved. In the wilderness they were cleansed of the old. In the wilderness they started anew. In the wilderness they discovered who they were supposed to be.
Today, Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, functions as a weeklong reminder. People construct booths outside their homes—so thin that one can see the stars—to remember a wandering long passed, when their ancestors had only the desert and their God.
In the wilderness the Hebrews became a people. The Orynthian Quadren is no exception.
They too required an environment that would test Dmitri’s patience and political naivete; could burn the shame and rage from Zaethan; and strip Luscia of her iron mask. It didn’t take forty years, but it certainly did take 700 pages. As the author, I cannot simply declare who the character is or who I’ve decided them to become. I must prove it in the pages. The character must prove it to themselves. And at some point, we must put both to the test.
Who we are in the in the wilderness is who we really are.
I say this as a living testament to the power of such a season in my own life. Having divorced in my mid-twenties, I’d chosen to stay and rebuild alone in Tennessee with negative dollars in my bank account, working seven days a week only to come home to a barren apartment and a crotchety cat. It was strenuous. It was lonely. Yet where I could not see the change to my circumstances day after day, it was quietly occurring inside me. And after a handful of months…after a year? That change was so palpable, I hardly recognized myself. I’d crossed a wilderness. Yet despite its hardship, I always remember it with such fondness. I wouldn’t be who I am without the struggle, the quiet nights, nor the hope that sprung from the darkness.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
~Viktor E. Frankl
Readers ought not ask what is happening in Boreal, but rather how Boreal is happening within our characters. Not what is the purpose of the wilderness, rather for what purpose is the wilderness preparing?
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Experience these themes in House of Boreal by embarking on your journey through Orynthia today!
