As the Church of the West, we are far more familiar with the God of the mountaintop than the God of the wilderness. When suffering crashes into our lives we often wonder where God is, and Lent is an annual practice that teaches us to find His presence in our wilderness.
It is the best-selling book of all time and sits at the center of our cultural consciousness, yet the Bible remains a difficult element of our faith. The confusion around the Bible might simply be that we’ve lost sight of what it is; a library of ancient writings, of both divine and human origin, that tell a unified story that leads to Jesus.
In the West, we have come to believe that stuff can satisfy our deepest longings–we would never admit that, but our closets, amazon purchases, and bank account betray us. The problem isn’t just stuff; it is the place that stuff occupies in our heart. Jesus’ alternative; “seek first the Kingdom.'“
We have a world that does its best to drown out silence and medicate loneliness with noise. When we experience a moment of silence it feels disruptive, unsettling, and agitating. Silence does not come naturally to us. But there is something beautiful in silence and solitude; It is where we enter into the mystery, the unknown, and realize that God is already there and has always been there.
The human condition is to experience a complex knot of desires. Many of those desires are God-given, good, and necessary for life on Earth. Many are disordered, nefarious, and destructive. For millennia, fasting, going without food and drink for a period of time, has been a core practice of the Church; this is in part because it brings our body and spirit into alignment clarifying our desires and reordering our appetites.
Lent provides an opportunity for us to practice drawing closer to God in the midst of suffering and the wilderness. We look to the example of Jesus, who in the moments where suffering is most difficult turned to prayer.
As the Church of the West, we are far more familiar with the God of the mountaintop than the God of the wilderness. When suffering crashes into our lives we often wonder where God is, and Lent is an annual practice that teaches us to find His presence in our wilderness. The Wilderness is a place of harsh clarity, an uncluttered discomfort, where our hearts are laid bare before God– and we discover one that is always there.
