9th March 2025
Into the Wilderness: a Place of Disorientation
At assembly this week, I asked the children to imagine a wilderness: the space, the big skies, the rough rocks and grainy sand, the noises of wild animals... I admit, this might have been a more powerful exercise had we not, a moment earlier, been taking part in a noisy and exciting pancake flipping competition!
As we enter this season of Lent, we journey with Jesus once again into the wilderness. In the wilderness, our creature comforts, our material security, the distractions that enable us to ignore the inner voice of our heart all melt away. We are faced with emptiness, silence, the daily struggle to survive. Here there are no landmarks. It's difficult to say how far you've travelled or where you’ve been when you're journeying through a wilderness.
Famously, following God's dramatic rescue from enslavement in Egypt, the Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years. They are not making their way purposefully from one destination to another - they wander. The way ahead of them is not clearly marked out. In fact, it seems incredibly arbitrary: when the cloud of God's presence is over the tabernacle, they stay put; when the cloud lifts, they set out (Exodus 40:34-38).
The wilderness is a place of disorientation where we lose our sense of purpose, familiar signposts, certainties. It's a disturbing place - the Israelites responded just as most of us would: they grumbled!
Many of us face "wilderness" periods in our lives. Illness, bereavement, losing a job, moving house, relationship breakdown – different life events can disorientate us, cause us to lose our old certainties with nothing tangible to hold onto. Life feels bleak; the empty space around us seems endless and the way ahead unsure.
In these difficult, painful places​ of disorientation, perhaps the long wanderings of the Israelites give us hope. For slowly, gradually, painfully, the Israelites learn the lesson of the wilderness. For God is not absent in the wilderness. God’s love sustains them, feeds them, leads them until they are ready to enter the Promised Land. The disorientating space of the wilderness is where they, and we, learn to place our trust not in ourselves, but in the endless, unmerited, unlimited love of God.
