Wilderness periods of our lives--those dry and desperate seasons when God seems distant and detached, perhaps even indifferent or impotent--can seem an abnormal and painful part of our lives that simply must be painfully plodded through and somehow endured. Yet, far from being something abnormal and life-threatening, like a cancer invading our bodies, wilderness periods represent a fundamental element of our life in the Spirit and part of God's well-orchestrated plan to guarantee that we become and possess everything he desires for us.

Patrick C. Heston is a retired pastor with the Free Methodist Church USA, whose spiritual formation ministry has taken him to multiple countries on four different continents and across denominational lines. He is a former sportswriter and current host of a weekday afternoon radio program on WBGZ in Alton, Illinois. He and his wife, Connie, have been married fifty years, with three grown children and seven grandchildren.