Wilderness is where the people of Israel spent 40 years after the exodus from Egypt. Freed from slavery, they spent the next 40 years wandering, in almost aimless circles, in the desert (as John Starke notes, Moses had “a lot to communicate to a people who are called to live free when they’ve known only slavery”). What sort of release from captivity is this turning out to be? Where is the freedom, where is the fulfilment of hope? Where is the love?
And we experience the same struggles. “I write a new book every day”? Hardly. We sketch out a rough draft and then fill the waste-bin with rejected scripts. Even the most accomplished among us remain complete amateurs at penning a tale that makes sense of life, that holds out hope as a validated reality.
We need far more than our own words, our own designs. That book looks ready to be pulped before it’s even been written.
Our great confidence is that the Lord is the divine Author and the overarching theme of his tale is love, a love that persists even in the wilderness of our own choices. It’s the story of a love that seeks and saves, that keeps and guards, that sanctifies the heart and clarifies the hope. A love that doesn't wilt in the burning heat of a shade-less noon at the foot of a Cross. When all around and within our soul gives way, he then, in great covenant love, is all our strength and stay.
And his pen is filled with indelible ink. There can be no erasing of his declared promise to take and make a people for himself, the commitment to melt their hard hearts even as they endure the wilds of the wilderness.
In the book of Hosea, his love to a wayward people - people just like us - is expressed with deepest compassion:
I am now going to allure her;I will lead her into the wildernessand speak tenderly to her. (Hosea 2:14)
In the most unexpected and dramatic twist in the tale, the wilderness experience was for the sake of winning his people’s hearts back to him, saving them from the destruction of their sins. The cold light of their exilic day would expose the decay of their waywardness, even as the rising sun would declare the Lord’s unfailing love, its heat beginning to thaw their obduracy.
Has he been softening your heart, to bring you back to himself? Or opening your eyes to see that what you thought was paradise is, in truth, the badlands? If he is doing that it is an act of tenderest kindness. He wants to bring you home.
In his novel, Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry describes young J Crow’s days in an orphanage after his adoptive parents’ deaths. He would wake in fear but slowly grew accustomed to where he now lived - but he knew it wasn’t what he longed for:
After I quit waking up afraid, feeling that I might be nowhere, I began getting used to the place. I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be, always, day in and day out, year in and year out, was Squires Landing and all that fall of country between Port William up on the ridge and the river between Sand Ripple and Willow Run. When I heard or read the word home, that patch of country was what I thought of. Home was one of the words I wrote in my tablet.
Home, his heavenly home, is what the LORD writes on the tablets of our hearts. Soon enough, our wilderness days will close and its love theme finally fulfilled. The waiting country will be exchanged for eternal dwellings and our dear Lord Jesus, the one who suffered in a wilderness and overcame, will speak his words of heartiest welcome.
************
Instead of a hymn to close this email, here’s a link to a new song by the super-talented Rob Halligan, where he has put some words I wrote to music and I could not be more chuffed!
This item was first published on the waiting country newsletter - to subscribe see below:
