The desert experience of the people of Israel was a difficult time of testing and penance, of getting lost and discovering the way, as the Lord sought to mould them into His covenant people.
Yet the later prophets looked back on it as the honeymoon period in the people’s relationship with the Lord. The most beautiful of these prophetic evocations is the one we find in Hosea 2, which speaks of the Lord luring His people back into the wilderness, speaking tenderly to them there, betrothing them to Himself for ever, and giving them "a door of hope".
