Tanya Godsey

4 min read ⭑

One night, I lay in the darkness, awake past midnight, asking God questions in a wilderness season. I was living in one of the most confusing and personal ministry heartaches of my life. I felt caught between the corners of my calling and a new awareness that I would never be fully received in a ministry circle I had once called home. There in the dark, as a familiar worship song poured over me, I wept and prayed. I confessed: God, they will never fully receive me for who you made me to be. Never. Why have you placed me here?

What followed my vulnerable and raw admission is one of the most sacred, supernatural experiences I’ve ever had in my own secret place with God. In a distinctly dark wilderness moment, I felt what could only be described as an overwhelming sense that my Trinitarian God had not only heard me but had stooped down low, across time and space, to comfort me with his Word, with his experience. He began to fill my mind and heart with moments in Scripture in which he, too, had felt the relational sting of rejection: in Eden, in the events that led to the great Flood, when his people rejected him to worship the golden calf, and when they rejected him as King upon King Saul’s rise to power. The list was long and so very personal. God stood in solidarity with my suffering. He was all too familiar with the taste of relational disappointment. He knew how to drink that cup.

In this moment, I felt the palpable presence of Jesus, who, as a man of many sorrows, was well acquainted with grief. Scenes from his life and countless moments during which he had experienced being misunderstood and scorned instantly flooded my heart. Rejection in his hometown of Nazareth. Constant disapproval, cynicism and dismissal from the religious elite of his day. His aloneness in Gethsemane when he’d asked his friends to watch and pray. On the cross, when the whole world turned its face away. I wept harder at the memory of every scene. Jesus stood in solidarity with me in the same way God is close to the brokenhearted and the crushed in spirit. My own spirit was filled with a real-time knowing.

The family of God attended to my grief with palpable presence made complete as the Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity, consoled me in a flood of thought. He took me on a journey of what it means to offer comfort, gently convict and faithfully guide God’s children only to have those promptings dismissed in countless invisible moments our hearts will never bear witness to and our eyes will never see. I was not alone, there in the dark of my own corner of the wilderness. My Trinitarian God befriended me, and I wept because, in that moment, the level of relational intimacy I felt was more personal, biblical, palpable and meaningful than what any human being, any song or any sermon could’ve imparted to me.

This is the incomparable beauty, intimacy, mystery and power of the secret place. I worshiped in the wake of this supernatural moment in time with my closest friends, the Trinity, and felt sure God not only heard me but had me. The years that followed would prove this to be true as the heavy darkness of heartbreak transformed into the thick cocoon of my becoming. In this solitary refinement with him, in the secret place, I was being woven and spun by God into an entirely new being. In his mercy, this cocoon would not become a coffin but a doorway to destiny. I emerged on the other side, renamed and remade. Unbound by gravity, I took flight on the winds of a new current. God opened my brand-new wings to soar on the current of all he had reimagined me to be.

If you find yourself in a similar place, I encourage you to hold on. When God himself is with you, the wilderness becomes a womb, a womb where the secret of the secret place with God is to protect your becoming as you give yourself fully to the solitary process of spiritual metamorphosis.

The formational fire of the wilderness is a holy test, a test John the Baptist passed over a lifelong process. John the Baptist didn’t simply visit the wilderness; he lived there. If we look through the lens of our culture, we might place his lifestyle in the category of a lifelong trial of suffering. After all, no one would voluntarily establish themselves in such a desolate place. We want convenience and ease. We want the company of friends and peers. We want provision and plenty.

But what if wilderness solitude and obscurity with God — free from distraction and noise — is where the gold of intimacy is mined with God? What if, in God’s upside-down Kingdom, obscurity with God is actually the doorway to healthy dependence and deliverance from the idol of visibility?

Tanya Godsey is an Artist, Speaker, Spiritual Director, Podcast Host (The Unforced Gifts) and author of Befriending God. She is in that seemingly small family of Artists who are gifted and called to function as rare hybrids. As both a Shepherd and a creative conduit Tanya shares stories and truth, whether musical or spoken, with a heart for life transformation. Her relational heart for God and His people was deeply formed in the immigrant church she was raised in. Now 20+ years later, Tanya has recorded four critically acclaimed albums with her 5th album set to release in 2025.

Adapted from “Befriending God” by Tanya Godsey. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers.

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