Wilderness by Michael Moore
Back in the early 1990’s (Nov 90 – Mar 94), I was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. It was my first Active duty assignment with the Air Force. Moving from a small yoked parish in Northern Minnesota (two churches, combined membership of maybe 120) to this installation was mind blowing! I went from having three serious counseling cases in three years to having perhaps as many as 40 in one week. During that time, our nation went to war. And we are still at war today. The lives of military members and the life of this chaplain changed drastically when the phrases deployment and expeditionary cycle came into our lexicon.
In 1993, I was able to attend a concert that Michael Card, a Christian musician, put on in Wichita Falls. It was a transformative moment for me. The setting was very simple. His piano was at the center of the stage and he didn’t have a back-up band. It was just Michael Card, his piano, and the audience. He would stop to talk in between his songs. He talked about the development/writing of the particular song and what the message was that he hoped would come from it.
I was experiencing significant spiritual burn-out by that point thanks to too many death notifications, having to identify the body of my colleague who had been murdered, and lots of high stress counseling cases. And, with the work-load and hours, personal spiritual development and refreshment had taken a back burner. My spirit was parched. Spiritually, I was running on empty. So when Michael Card began to talk about his next song, “In the Wilderness”, he hit a chord deep within my spirit.
When you are tired and weary… When your prayers seem empty and your scripture study is dry… Don’t give up! Keep on Praying! Keep on Reading! Keep on Walking with the Lord! Everybody has wilderness experiences in their lives… He said, “I have had them in mine…” And then he sat down and began playing the song. Here are the lyrics:
In the wilderness
In the wilderness
He calls His sons and daughters
To the wilderness
But He gives grace sufficient
To survive any test
And that’s the painful purpose
Of the wilderness
In the wilderness we wander
In the wilderness we weep
In the wasteland of our wanting
Where the darkness seems so deep
We search for the beginning
For an exodus to hold
We find that those who follow Him
Must often walk alone
In the wilderness
In the wilderness
He calls His sons and daughters
To the wilderness
But He gives grace sufficient
To survive any test
And that’s the painful purpose
Of the wilderness
In the wilderness we’re wondering
For a way to understand
In the wilderness there’s not a way
For the ways become a man
And the man’s become the exodus
The way to holy ground
Wandering in the wilderness
Is the best way to be found
In the wilderness
In the wilderness
He calls His sons and daughters
In the wilderness
But He gives grace sufficient
To survive any test
And that’s the painful purpose
Of the wilderness
Groaning and growing
Amidst the desert days
The windy winter wilderness
Can blow the self away
In the wilderness
In the wilderness
He calls His sons and daughters
To the wilderness
But He gives grace sufficient
To survive any test
And that’s the painful purpose
Of the wilderness
And that’s the painful promise
Of the wilderness
Lyrics by Michael Card
Michael Card helped me to find my way to the well of the Lord’s refreshment that evening. And his words and the song have stayed with me all these years as I have traversed the world and ministered in a wide variety of settings. In the Wilderness, God gives grace sufficient to survive any test.
When Jesus went to the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan after 40 days and nights of fasting and praying, God gave Christ sufficient grace to survive that test. As Jesus drew closer to Jerusalem and the Cross, God gave him grace sufficient for the test. And on the cross, God’s grace was sufficient.
Lent is a time of self-reflection in the church year. It is a time to go inward and take inventory of your spiritual life and journey. While these are things we are called to do each and every day, Lent is a special season set aside to do just that. I have walked with a lot of people through the years through their own personal wildernesses. And I have walked through many wildernesses of my own.
The picture above is of a place on the Western edge of Ireland called The Burren (Gaelic Boireann, meaning “great rock”). It is a desolate looking place and especially harsh when the wind is blowing off of the North Atlantic. At first glance, all you see are jagged rocks that are completely barren. However, as Denise and I got out of the car and began to walk over the rocks, it was amazing! The rocks that looked so harsh, jagged, and barren were actually holding life. There were plants flowering and growing out of the cracks in the rock where dirt and seed had lodged. Even in the “wilderness” hope was alive in the form of those rugged and beautiful flowers!
Dear reader, are you walking through the wilderness? Are you tired? Are you feeling like life is empty? You are in the wilderness. But you are NOT alone! Take it from a Padre who has plenty of wilderness experience, you are not alone. In the words of Michael Card, keep praying… keep reading Scripture… keep walking… For the Lord walks with you. May God bless and keep you as you walk through the wilderness with grace sufficient for any test.
Hunger by Alex Tang
By Alex Tang
I feel like I am a jigsaw puzzle – partially assembled but with many pieces missing. There are pieces of me all over the place. Some pieces are lodged in my wife, children and grandchildren, friends, workplace, church, hobbies, and my social tribes. Other pieces are hidden deep inside my inner being. Some pieces are hidden so deep that I am unaware of them. All my life, I have felt a sense of incompleteness, fragmentation and longing. This longing is a siren call for completeness; for the jigsaw to be assembled; for every piece to be in its rightful place. Then I believe I can really know who I am from the picture on the jigsaw. I recognize this feeling as a hunger for shalom; for wholeness and completeness.
Shalom is a beautiful word in Hebrew. Often translated to English as peace, shalom in the Hebrew context has a far deeper meaning. It denotes wholeness, completeness, fulfilment and contentment. Shalom gives the sense of living in the Garden of Eden with God before the Fall. It implies reconciliation of broken relationships. Shalom gives the picture of a soul fully expressed to its full God-given potential, at peace with itself, with God, with other people and with creation. It affirms everything is in its rightful place.
The New Testament describes Jesus as shalom in two ways. Firstly, Jesus is shalom. Jesus is called the Prince of Peace [shalom] (Isaiah 9:6). Jesus is Completeness as God. Secondly, Jesus becomes shalom for us. Paul explains, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace [shalom] with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. . . . But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:1–2, 8–10). By his death on the cross, Jesus becomes shalom or the means of reconciliation with God for us. This shalom with God for us is a one-off event. It is a total and complete reconciliation. The broken relationship is fully healed. This happened more than two thousand years ago.
Yet we hunger for shalom. We hunger not because God’s work is not complete but because our healing has not completed. We are in the process of putting the pieces together as we grow towards spiritual maturity. This takes time. We hunger for what we will become when we are fully matured spiritually which is shalom. Hence our continuing hunger. Lent is the season when our hunger intensifies. This is because during Lent, we are reminded anew of the shalom work of Jesus; God incarnate born to die for us. We need this reminder. We need to be reminded that we must discipline our bodies, mortify our unhealthy desires and renew our easily distracted purpose of spiritual growth as we work towards shalom. We look forward to when we no longer hunger, when we finally are one with Christ, who is himself, shalom.
Graphic by Steve Wickham
Do you yearn for rest that appears ever further away?
SOMETHING I hurry against is busyness. This is about wanting to get ahead so I can earn a place of rest and contemplation. The only issue is I’ll often find myself reaching the point of frustration well before I can rest and contemplate. Then, rest and contemplation are further off than ever. Like happiness, peace proves rather elusive when all we can think of seeking is peace — when it’s ever at arm’s length away.
Whatever we desperately seek can either drive us motivationally or it can drive us away from that which we seek. What we’re desperate for ought therefore to pique our awareness. Desperation needs to be converted into intention. When intention becomes strategy, we’re well on the way to a sustained execution of our goal.
We cannot expect that just because we want something badly that that’s enough to acquire it. Again, strategy is what we need. Strategy mixed with intention will be enough to advance us toward our goal: the objective of a rested state which equates to sustained behavioural change.
We cannot ‘earn’ our rest
If we seek to earn our rest, we’ll be quite disappointed. A restful state cannot coalesce with the fury of haste. Anger drives the gentle spirit of the Greek epieikes deep into a chaotic oblivion because there are discordant goals afoot. A self-imposed pressure or pressure from another source also makes rest impossible.
Rest is a gentle place arrived at in gentleness.
Rest is a state of mind that gives the heart permission to be at ease; and, a heart that placates the mind.
Contemplation is not something that will come at us like the rest of life does. Its sweet and indelible presence needs to be invited in; it needs to be sought and then embraced. Room needs to be made for it. Space in our schedules needs to be cleared. Our pace of life needs to be slowed down overall. It needs to become important.
To ‘earn’ our rest is to drive our rest away, not that being diligent and responsible are bad things. Being quietly effectual is, of itself, possible in rest. It is possible to be industrious and restful at the same time. It’s a state of being that’s possible, but only if we take the Presence of God with us, via a rest of Christ contemplation.
A real peace – Rest by Christ Contemplation
A rest via Christ contemplation is simply the practice of a holy and reflective reverie of spiritual bliss; to be lost in one’s thoughts in the majesty of the Spirit’s Presence.
Such a practice can be taken with us; it can be enjoyed mindfully, anywhere.
A real peace is available anytime we try it, simply in enjoying the Presence of Christ with us, presently, and contemplating the fact he is with us as well as being prayerful in the moment to imagine what the Lord is saying.
We can imagine the grace of the Lord permeating us, bringing us shalom like no other peace, simply because he’s there, in our midst, slowing all of life down, because life suddenly has an eternal perspective. See the pace of the natural world. Like clockwork: no hurry or busyness there, just natural cooperation.
We can imagine his Spirit speaking in the dulcet tones of eternity, bringing the pace of our pulse down into reflectiveness. We can imagine Jesus saying, “Do you love me?” and his approving affirmation when we answer him as Peter did, “Of course I do, Lord,” even as we conjure up ways of loving him more by resting better. We imagine being a Mary, pleasing Jesus simply by stopping and being with him. We imagine communing with Jesus as Simon of Cyrene did — in a moment’s glance — in helping his Saviour carry his cross — and we imagine eternity communicated in one solitary pain-lit glance.
***
Do you hunger for peace and your place with Christ? He wants you. He wants you to want him. And he wants this for you, not for himself.
Jesus knows our peace, and he knows it’s in himself that we’ll secure it.
The rest of Christ contemplation gives us peace, and the capacity to learn the experience of joy.
No matter what is our struggle, God can help us overcome it; the rest of peace deep in our soul is the way.
Deep peace, fervent contentment, vapid joy, surging hope: all through Jesus.
Letting materialism ebb away, and the simplicity of his Spirit flow in.
But we must first enter in; slow down into Christ contemplation. To where he welcomes us, as we are.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.
I had not planned to post any new Lenten prayers this year. I am so enjoying those posted by others instead. However the popularity of this prayer when I posted it on the Light for the Journey Facebook page this week prompted me to at least share this one with you. Enjoy!
Open Face courtesy of Morguefile
One of the things I believe is scarce in the conversations we have, particularly on social media and blogs, is honesty. Perhaps even more so in Christian circles, where we are sometimes scared to admit our fears, our ignorance and our pain, and certainly we rarely talk about sin or the dark things that have a hold on us, as though now we know salvation we have instantly become perfect and free from every poison. I know also as a writer that it is so much neater if what I want to say all fits into 800 words and doesn’t contradict itself, and preferably has three summarising words that all start with the same letter. It’s nice if it feels whole and I can make a sweet meme to encapsulate the wisdom I believe I’m sharing. Sometimes that happens, but it feels unsatisfactory, a little hollow, even. That carefully contained few paragraphs is never the fullness of what I want to say or read.
Yes, I want to share and find thoughts, truths, even, sometimes beauty. But I also want to cast a light down into the dark places and let readers know that it is okay to portray these too. I want to profess my own ignorance and laugh at my failures and be fully human. So when I come across a writer who is not afraid to say that this is not how it always is, or to show compassion for the dark sides to our moons, to even dare to say we might learn something from our shadows, I feel more sated. When I experience the freedom to say how it really is, how it honestly feels, what the upside and downside is, to admit that compassion and the heart want to stray elsewhere, along the gutters and down the stained steps and beside the lost or the dying, then my truth-seeking missile-mind leaps with joy. Because my God is a down in the pigsty, slipping away from the stoners, shouting at the Pharisees, calling out the Baal-worshippers, seeing the fiery chariots that are invisible to everyone else, dragging me up from the deep drowning waters to prophesy salvation kind of God.
Don’t we need, more than ever in this terrifying world, to talk about the scary stuff? Promiscuity, mistakes, violence, abuse, poverty, pornography, death, pride, alcoholism, the stink of self-righteousness, sickness, consumerism, misogyny, slavery, the scandals of institutionalised racism and patriarchy? Not to obsess about them, because Philippians 4:8 (a guiding verse for me) makes it clear our focus is the light, the good, the wonderful. But to have honest conversations in order to help one another, we need to be truthful.
Even more than this, I want to be searingly honest about the one who is the centre of my life. I want to be able to describe him as a her when I feel it appropriate, or say God is beyond gender and outside of time, I want to boggle minds and push boundaries of conventional understanding. To talk about where we sadden the Lord or frustrate her. This longing to be real, to talk to the Church about how our fellowships need to be whole, inclusive, all-encompassing, truly forgiving and loving, this is a hunger I have stirring and crunching my innards, and I see it in others too.
I see a community of searching disciples of Christ of all ages who look at him, hear his words, take them on board in a fire of deeply passionate commitment and then look disappointedly at the coolness of the organised religions around them. I see that desire to bridge the gaps they see, to be the change that’s needed, to have the difficult discussions and hold the spaces around disagreements and doctrine with holy patience. I want this honesty because I long for the Body of Christ to be an organism that the world can look at, and see him. Look at and say, oh, those Jesus folks, they are about love. Not the easy, on the surface, smile now gossip later, maybe we’ll do lunch kind, but the completely committed, there for you in a crisis and a chronic situation, not just now but always, warts and all, unjudging agape wholeness. However paining or hard it is, above all I want our servant-king-friend-brother-lover of our souls to look at us as he did at Nathaniel and say, “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.”
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Matai Bay by Ana Lisa De Jong
Today reading Christine Sine’s beautiful prayer on her Godspace Post ‘Meditation Monday – A Prayer for Ash Wednesday’ I was struck by these words, ‘may this journey of Lent get us ready, to be God’s good news of hope and wholeness and resurrection life’. Meditation Monday – A Prayer for Ash Wednesday
God has been teaching me much about the Kingdom of God lately. As I consider the Holy Spirit’s whisperings, I think how the teachings come from many different directions, and together form a picture of what the Holy Spirit seeks to impress upon me. In other words, ‘the radio programme I just heard’, or ‘the journal entry I wrote last week’, or ‘the prayer I just read’, or ‘the conversation I had’, or ‘the bible verse that jumped out at me’, they are all means God uses to get my attention, (which normally jumps around like a puppet on a string), and draw my focus to a message or idea that he wants to me to understand deeper, or even to recall once again! At the moment, for me, it’s the Kingdom of God. And the recent revelation that came to mind was that though the Kingdom of God is within us, it is not meant to remain within us, but is meant to impact the world around us. We are transformed to transform the world in which we live, through the sharing of the Kingdom within us. The Kingdom is evolving. By sharing the Kingdom we can have a hand in transforming the present, and future of those around us. We are creative beings, made by a creator God. The creating is never over. I look down at the bookmark in my journal as I write this. It reads, ‘In a word what I am saying is, ‘Grow up. You are Kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God created identity. Live generously and graciously towards others, the way God lives towards you.’, Matthew 5:48 (The Message). And I remember a poem written a couple of years earlier, on the theme of passing on what we have been given.
Life – As a Gift
If life is indeed a gift,
then we being alive, must bear the gifts of life.
Our whole and entire purpose…
to breathe it in,
to grow in its nourishment,
to reproduce it, to extend it.
It was given to BE PASSED ON.
Fishes and loaves to feed thousands,
dandelion seeds aloft on the wind.
To land where they will,
and take root where they can,
and bring and give new life.
If life is a gift
then we, the receivers of such a gift;
unwrap it to find
a gift, within a gift, within a gift.
And at the centre – a seed.
A seed, not to be stored,
not to be hidden,
not to be discounted,
or disregarded.
But to be planted,
nurtured, encouraged;
cultivated to full and beautiful expression.
And in its strong and tender growth
harvested and released….
Released to grow another harvest.
Released to inspire another gift.
Released to encourage another’s faith.
Released to embolden another believer,
to take their seed out of the dark.
We pour it out, until we are empty.
But we refill with each and every breath,
of the Holy Spirit;
who is not only the giver of gifts,
but the one and only greatest gift.
In whom is truth, and light and ‘fullness’ of life.
His fullness flowing into us, that we might release it.
A gift given that we might re-gift it,
life given for us to respond to Him,
with the gift of our life.
All the tentative talents and fledging abilities,
within that gift of life, harnessed and then
passed on, shared out,
given back, in order that they might flourish…
for His purposes.
I have never really been hungry, at least not by necessity. I occasionally fast a meal (a little more frequently during this season of Lent,) and like so many in our society go on a spring diet to try and lose those few extra pounds that have accumulated over the Christmas season.
My hunger is a choice.
My dieting is a choice, my hunger is a choice and there is plenty of food around to tempt me away from it, and sometimes I succumb. And of course I have lots of ways to rationalize my lack of dieting discipline.
What decisions would real hunger force me to make I wonder and how would I respond? My hunger doesn’t gnaw at my stomach because there is nothing to fill it, and I certainly don’t face the soul destroying choice of whether to feed my family the last of the seeds I have stored or to keep them to plant in expectation of next year’s harvest and let my children starve.
Would I have the discipline to cling to the future hope of a coming harvest and hang onto seed for planting or would I succumb to the immediate desire for another meal? Would I be willing to make the choice that poor societies have made since the beginning of time to let one person starve so that others might live? In some cultures when hunger struck the elderly made a deliberate decision to walk away and die so that others could live. In others a choice might be made to allow one child to starve so that the rest could survive.
Maybe even more importantly how would I respond if those around me were hungry and I still had enough seed left to plant my fields in expectation of an abundant harvest? What sacrifices am I willing to make so that everyone in our world has enough?
Would I be willing to starve so that others might live?
Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. After this fast, He was, as you can imagine, hungry. But He was also curiously stronger, when the tempter came to Jesus. Devil: If You are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread. Jesus (quoting Deuteronomy): It is written, “Man does not live by bread alone. Rather, he lives on every word that comes from the mouth of the Eternal One.” (Matthew 4:1-3, The Voice)
As I reflected on the second of the weekly prompts in our Lenten guide Hungering for Life, it occurred to me that my question: would I be willing to starve so that others might live? was very much the dilemma that Jesus faced. He had choices about how to respond to his physical hunger. He could have walked out of the desert and gone back to have a meal with friends. Even when he decided to stay, the devil had great ideas about how he could overcome those physical hunger pangs. Yet he resisted.
Jesus resisted because he knew there was more to life than the assuaging of physical cravings. The deeper hunger gnawing at his soul was a hunger to see God’s world restored and all of creation made whole. He was willing to endure physical hunger and even to face death because he knew it would mean that others would come to know life. He was willing to let the seed of his life fall into the ground and die so that it could grow and provide an abundant harvest that others could feed on.
So as we sit here this morning what is the hunger that gnaws at our souls? Is it a hunger for physical food and comfort for ourselves or is it a longing after justice, righteousness and freedom for all the peoples’ of the earth?
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