We want to live on emotional mountaintops, but the reality is that spiritual fruit does not grow on mountaintops; it grows in the valleys. It grows in times of difficulty.

In Isaiah 43, God said, “For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland” (verse 19 NLT).

It’s in the wasteland, in the hardships, in the difficulties that we often experience God in a way that we don’t experience Him anywhere else.