Please, not the wilderness!

Whatever counts as wilderness in your life, I'd bet you would prefer to avoid it.  It might be that time between test and diagnosis or those months after a romantic break-up.  It might be those long, painful days into weeks (please God not too many months) between jobs.  It can even be that horrid time when a loved one is lost, a lifetime of work is destroyed, or a dream is shattered.

The wilderness is that place where the wild things are - beyond civilization, beyond the familiar, outside the norms. Animals with names like uncertainty, fear, anxiety, insomnia....and the worst of emotions, insecurity roam free and flourish.  It is the place where whatever you considered absolutely essential (the very word means 'necessary for life') which might have been as mundane as a short line at the coffee shop, has now morphed into the most basic of human needs:  a kind word, a place to sit, a little comfort food.

And that's just the first stage of wilderness living.

In the wilderness, we are naked.  All of our status is stripped away.  Perhaps that is the first pain.  We no longer have a title, like 'teacher' or 'barista' or 'husband' or 'healthy.'  We no longer have an answer to that friendly question, "What do you do?"   or maybe "How's it going?" Routine is gone; expectations shift.

But, of course, it goes deeper.  We are unnerved by whatever has thrown us into this barren place without road markers, without GPS.  Who am I?  How did I get here?  Where am I going?  How will I make it?  Looking back on it, our teen years were probably the first time we were conscious of this unsettling wilderness space.  In a space without boundary lines to mark our edges, we fear flying off the face of the earth.  We think we will disintegrate; we will lose ourselves.

Oh Lord, how we hate the wilderness.  Please don't send us there.

It's a cry that our Lord might not truly understand, for if we spend some time in the God story we call the Bible, the wilderness is where God does some of her best work.  Sinai?  Elijah escaping Jezebel?  Jesus in the Judean desert?  Jonah? 

See you tomorrow.