Strange Pilgrimage...part 2

To go into darkness because of lust shows one driven by instinct.
To go into darkness because of rage shows one driven by pride.
To go into darkness to seek an exchange of the real light for the spiritual strange-light shows one tempted to hyper-calculation in the cosmic game, but..
To go into the darkness on Commissioned pilgrimage? What does that show?

"You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You."

These words echo in my mind as I wander into this dark unknown.
These words, too, become more real:
"The desire of our soul is for Your name and for the remembrance of You."

I am struck by Your timing. Months we spent, feeling stalled in a fiery pit of affliction. Then in a flash, we came to understand it.

Only a few days have passed since we came to see, and then found in Scripture, the words that explain the course of this fire You sent. And that fire has been like the electric leap from one nerve cell to another in the brain-- and it has been like these waters of affliction You poured on us served as a conductor for that electric leap, taking us to the place that defines Your purpose.

Only a few days have we understood that we might stand in the position of the just as You demonstrate this truth:
"O Most Upright, You weigh the path of the just.
Yes, in the way of Your judgments, O Lord, we have waited for you;
...With my soul I have desired You in the night,
Yes, by my spirit within me I will seek You early;
For when Your judgments are in the earth,
the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness."

And it is an honor to be so placed by Your hand, but on the heels of the discovery of this positioning comes the call to move on, the push to send us to a new place.

So I walk into the dark, and the dark feels familiar in bad ways; like dark felt in the days before You knew me for purposes of Your own, before I could stand naked with the just and be unashamed. First, in this dark, I meet up with a pestilence...flies, locusts? Hard to tell in the pitch black. But they buzz around me, prompting me to thrash and bat at them. And I wonder, do they represent the days I am coming out of even now? The days just after time spent so palpably real in Your garden? But You are already speaking into my mind the reasons why I must go even deeper into this darkness:
"Let grace be shown to the wicked, yet he will not learn righteousness."

I go away from Your garden for two reasons. The first, that I might serve as example of the results of grace. In this task, I follow in the footsteps of my Savior wherever He might go, even to the "depths of Sheol." Where He went to proclaim Himself the author of all righteousness that springs from faith in Him, I now follow to proclaim Him finisher of the same. But I know from the visions spoken by prophets in days long gone, this "evidence" will not bear fruit, even in the words echoing from Isaiah's text above. Still, the law and the testimony must be fulfilled, so I march on. And the flying pests begin to dissipate.

I go forward for two reasons. The second, that I have a place in the wilderness to find, a place prepared for me by God. So on a personal level, my pilgrimage relates to the finding of this hiding place. I must know--in God's world of visions at least--where that place is, must know it in my belly before I ever walk into it in this life's actualities. And while in this dream-prayer my pilgrimage is played on the symbolic and spiritual plane (and therefore appears quite fantastic compared to the way it will play in actuality) still the synaptic leap between the two will once again be obvious to me when the actual occurs; so for wisdom's sake, I must go on. And so I leave the land of the flying pests behind me.

The next layer of darkness opens before me; I move into a land made to house the lost souls of men...

And here You remind me of the words You spoke hundreds of years before You were born, and again now thousands of years after You died:
"I the Lord, am the first; and with the last I am He."