Surviving the wilderness
Facing the truth and finding freedom
“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.” Richard Rohr.
If you follow the church calendar, we are currently in Lent, the forty day period leading up to Easter, reflecting the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness. Sometimes we choose the wilderness. We fast in solidarity with the poor, or give something up to make more space for God. But more often, I have found, the wilderness chooses us.
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I’ll be okay if…
I wonder how you would finish that sentence?
I’ll be okay if I’m financially stable.
I’ll be okay if I get married.
I’ll be okay if my career is successful.
I’ll be okay if I have a baby.
I’ll be okay if this illness gets better.
I’ll be okay if these particular people approve of me.
But life doesn’t always work out the way you want it too.
You get burnt out and have to leave the career you love.
Once cherished relationships fracture and refuse to heal.
You’re in your forties with no marriage and no kids and no house of your own.
This is the landscape of the wilderness. It’s the place that shatters our illusions, our half truths and our easy answers. It’s the place of wrestling with God and walking with a limp ever after. It’s the place that will break your heart, and if you allow it, where you can find deeper healing and greater wholeness. It’s a place of truth that is painful, but also sets you free to know the vast, solid, unshakable love of God that will never let you go.
Mark’s gospel tells us that after Jesus’s baptism,
‘The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness for forty days being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him’ (Mark 1:12-13).
Debie Thomas points out that ‘it’s worth holding onto this image of Mark’s… because the austere and complicated landscape he describes, the bizarre menagerie of despair and solace, isolation and accompaniment, is where we live. This is the realm where God’s work of holy repair begins’ 1.
We come into the wilderness via different routes, but I think there are three truths we all come face to face with while we’re there that begin this work of ‘holy repair.’
First, we learn that being good does not save us from pain. We’re often led to believe that if we live the right way, if we read our bible, pray enough and follow the rules of Christian living, all will go well for us. But sooner or later, we learn this isn’t true. We pray and pray and still live with chronic illness. We forgive someone who hurt us, reach out to repair the relationship, and still get rejected. We do our best to follow Jesus, but we still fail in our career. It’s a bitter truth to swallow. “It’s so unfair!” we rail. And that is true. Life is sometimes unfair. It can be painful and difficult and go wrong, no matter how good we are. After all, as Barbara Brown Taylor points out, ‘Jesus was as good as it gets, and still he suffered.’
This leads us to our second wilderness truth: life is not one-dimensional. In the wilderness, we discover that two things can be true at the same time. Life can be unfair and good, hard and hopeful, difficult and joyful. In this place we wrestle with wild beasts – untameable questions that sink their claws into us and won’t let us go: Is God good? Can God be trusted? Am I really loved? But in this landscape we are not left alone, we are also attended by ministering angels. They come in the form of clean sheets and warm blankets. Good music and kind strangers. Daffodils that bloom in spring. Friends who stay close to us in the struggle. This rugged terrain offers us the freedom to be honest about what is painful and what is good, and to accept the complex, beautiful, messy mystery of it all.
Our final truth is perhaps the most difficult one to accept: that we are loved by God, no matter what. In my own wilderness seasons I have found it difficult to accept that God can love me and I can still be suffering at the same time. Why would God let this happen? Why didn’t God answer my prayers? Why won’t God help me when I need it? These are hard questions. I can’t answer them for myself, so I won’t try to answer them for you. But what I have found is that God’s love sustains us through what we never imagined we could survive. Our worst fears happen, we fall as low as we think it’s possible, and find to our surprise, that at the very bottom of everything, God’s love is there. A firm foundation still holding us. So our “I’m okay if…” becomes just “I’m okay.”
My career fell apart and I’m okay.
This relationship couldn’t be repaired and I’m okay.
I still have a chronic illness and I’m okay.
These people don’t think well of me and I’m okay.
I can’t have a baby and I’m okay.
None of this negates the pain we go through in the breaking, but here is the truth: having a hard time is not a sign that God doesn’t love us or care about us. We can be loved and struggling. We can be loved and hurting. We can be loved and suffering. We are loved no matter what else we’re going through.
Shortly before his death in a Nazi prison camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘only a suffering God can help.’ When God seems to be a million miles away and deaf to my pain, it helps me to think of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane: “Father, take this cup of agony away from me…” God did not answer Jesus’ prayer either, and it comforts me to know that I’m not alone. He understands how it feels when you can’t bypass suffering, but have to go through it.
Debie Thomas writes ‘In the wilderness, the love that survives is hardcore. It is flinty, not soft. Salvific, not sentimental. We don’t learn to trust it quickly. It takes forty days. Forty years. Lifetimes.’2 It is this kind of love that meant Jesus trusted the Father in Gethsemane, and Bonheoffer trusted God in a Nazi death camp. It is only this kind of gritty, relentless love that can sustain us, hold us safe and set us free.
This Lenten season I am holding onto the Easter promise that, like Jesus, even our hardest places can become transformative and beautiful and life-giving. Perhaps you’d like to hold onto it too?
Wilderness and desert will sing joyously,
the badlands will celebrate and flower—
Like the crocus in spring, bursting into blossom,
a symphony of song and color.
Mountain glories of Lebanon—a gift.
Awesome Carmel, stunning Sharon—gifts.
God’s resplendent glory, fully on display.
God awesome, God majestic.
Energize the limp hands,
strengthen the rubbery knees.
Tell fearful souls,
“Courage! Take heart!
God is here, right here,
on his way to put things right
And redress all wrongs.
He’s on his way! He’ll save you!”
Isaiah 35:1-6, The Message.
Into the Mess and Other Stories Jesus Told, p.43
Into the Mess and Other Stories Jesus Told, p.47
This is so good Abby. Thanks xx