Ever Been Stuck in the Desert?

photo by Johann Nilsson / flickr

"The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert in the heart of your brother."
--T.S. Eliot

Lent begins. And it began in the wilderness. Not in a church. But out there where the wind blew and sand got in your eyes. And nobody, but nobody was around except a few scorpions and sand fleas and silence. And its was there that the Lord Jesus hammered out where he might go and what he might do. Maybe more than that it was a time of enormous temptation. Like us he stood at cross-road and cross-road in that solitary place. It must have been tempting to listen to the Tempter. Do this…Do that. It doesn’t matter. Nobody, but nobody will ever know. And you will be successful. Which then and now in the world’s view is just about the greatest thing that could ever happen to you. 

And when the wilderness settles on us yet again—it is so tempting just to listen to all those jarring voices out there. Like Jesus long ago we have to struggle as he struggled. He learned something out there he never forgot. Maybe he remembered the teaching he learned at Synagogue. From one of the Isaiah scrolls:  “I will give you the treasures of the darkness, and hoards in secret places that you may know that is I, the Lord, the God of Israel.”

Leslie Weatherhead, a great English preacher of another day knew the truth of those words. He lived in England during those terrible days when his country and city was bombed night after night. His little girl so frightened she was scarred forever. He, himself faced again and again his own personal darkness. This is what he wrote:

I can only write down this simple testimony. “Like all men, I love and prefer the sunny uplands of experience when health, happiness, and success abound; but I have learned more about God, life, and myself in the darkness of fear and failure that I ever learned in the sunshine. There are such things as the treasures of darkness. The darkness, thank God, passes, but what one learns in the darkness, one possess forever.”

So maybe this Lent if you stand in your bleak wilderness. Loss of loved ones. Loss of health. Loss of friends. Loss of faith. Looking out on the madness of our time—we all need to remember what happened to our Lord. Destitute and famished,  Matthew says that at the end of that terrible forty days: “suddenly angels came and waited on him.”

Reckon in our time some angel just might come in the strangest form, and help us in time of need?

“In the deserts of the heart

      Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

                Teach the free man how to praise.”

—W.H. Auden

(This angel hangs over our kitchen sink. A gift in a hard time.)

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com