Today’s Lenten reflection was written by Revd Helen O’Sullivan, a Tutor within the Licensed Ministry Training programme.
“Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.” Deuteronomy 2:7
An Israelite reflects on the wilderness wanderings of the Exodus.
We complained a lot on those long days and chilly nights in the wild places, the only surroundings some of us had ever known. The stories had been handed down to us from the elders who had taken those first miraculous steps across the dried riverbed and into the unknown. Stories of slavery but safety, shackles but shelter, savageness but subsistence. While survival in Egypt had been hard it had at least been familiar, it may have been only half a life but each day was predictable and there was comfort in familiarity. And in that seemingly never-ending wilderness we all cried out for predictability and familiarity even if it meant a life half lived.
We knew the promises of God, had been taught them from our cradles, but in that barren, rocky place our God of the covenant felt silent, and our God of liberation seemed absent. Those forty years of wilderness wanderings were long years of struggle and despair, of feeling disconnected from God and fearful for the future.
But now we stand on the edge of the wilderness about to cross another river into the promised land of milk and honey. As my family and friends gaze at the path ahead I turn my head to look once more on the way we have come, on the rough, stony path curving away into the hazy horizon and I catch my breath. There in front of me is the dazzling wonder of the wilderness, the realisation that this barren emptiness, has not been empty at all but filled with the glory of God. At no point in our wilderness wanderings did God leave us or forsake us, at every turn God provided for our needs, built up our community and challenged our wayward hearts. When we heard silence, God was whispering to our souls, when we felt abandoned, God walked close beside us, when we were fearful, God’s Spirit was working in our hearts preparing us for the future.
This was the miracle of the wild places because it was only here, disconnected from the predictability and familiarity of our half lives, that our souls and hearts were open to the stirrings of God’s Spirit. It was only in this seemingly barren and lifeless wasteland that new life could spring and the divine promise of life in all its fullness could be nourished in our midst. I will soon turn and follow the path ahead into a land of abundance and hope but I will always carry in my heart the remembrance of God’s blessings in this time of hardship, the holy guidance in an unfamiliar place and the divine provision when all else seemed lost: the wonder of the wilderness.
