25th February 2024 

Wilderness Wonderings (1)

Lent is a wilderness season, the time when we remember Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness and the significance of the wilderness through scripture. Wilderness is a hard place, a place of sand which blows into your eyes and hard rocks beneath your feet. It's a place which can get unbearably hot by day and freezing cold by night. Food and water are hard to come by - the very business of survival is tough. And, in the darkness of night, wild beasts prowl...

I have enjoyed the different series of Race across the World on TV over the last few months. It's amazing how much of our world, even in the well-connected 21st century, is wild. And even in a carefully controlled environment, like that of a TV programme, the wilderness stages of the race can be hard. Wilderness tests our endurance, tests our resilience, tests our capacity to survive to its limits. Except, perhaps, for TV, people rarely choose to be in the wilderness.

Yet, in the Bible, the wilderness, although a hard place, is also a fertile place. For Jesus, his forty days in the wilderness are a time of preparation, a time where he learns to listen to his Father God and resist the siren calls of those who would try to tempt him to an easier way. Those forty days call to mind the forty years that the people of Israel spent in the wilderness after God rescued them from Egypt. There, through the grumbling and the difficulties, the false starts and the disappointments, God formed his people as a nation, made them ready to enter the land he had promised them. Their leader, Moses, I realised this week, had already spent forty years largely alone in the wilderness, tending his father-in-law's sheep, with no clear sense of who he was and what he was to do until his encounter with God in the burning bush.

All of us will at some point in our lives face the spiritual wilderness, the place of uncertainty, the place of wandering. Often, we will not choose it; it comes to us through particular circumstances, through a sudden shock - the loss of a loved one, or a job. In the wilderness there are no easy answers, and the path to renewed clarity is often not straight. We may feel that God is far away and that we are simply wandering in circles. But scripture tells us that, in the uncertainty, in the wandering, in the hard places, this is where God prepares us, shapes us, forms us for his service. In the words of the theologian Henri Nouwen:

"The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."
(The Wounded Healer, 1994)