Hi, my name is Pete Guzzara. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

podcast. It's great to be with you again after my summer sabbatical. Today's theme topic is

living in the desert without leaving your life. That is living in the desert without leaving your life. That is living

as a desert father or mother without leaving your life. Now, I've been thinking and writing about

this for many years, but this summer sabbatical in particular, deepened and even made clearer

my conviction around it.

Now, with COVID-19 having impacted and really shifted the church dramatically around the world,

and the church finding itself as polarized as the world around right and left politics,

and then with the scandals and lack of integrity, stuff going on,

it's amazing to me that a number of people want to go back to 2019 and pre-pandemic type of

ministry. And I just see it so clearly there's nothing more important for all of us than

getting to Jesus and learning to live in the

desert without leaving your life as an active leader for Christ. It's like Luke chapter 12 where Jesus

says, the crowd, when you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say it's going to rain,

and it does. And when you see a south wind blowing, you say it's going to be hot, and it does. And he says to the crowds, you hypocrite, you know how to

interpret the appearance of the earth and sky, but how is it that you don't know how to interpret

this present time? Now, of course, he's referring to his himself and his coming, but there's a

principle there about seeing what's happening around us. And so the invitation

today in this podcast is to live in a desert without leaving, without leaving your life. So let me

explain what I mean by desert as we launch into this. This comes from church history and the third to

the fifth centuries when men and women began

fleeing from the cities, especially in Egypt and other places in the Middle East.

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