Today’s Lenten reflection was written by Sally Russell, an LLM training through the Licensed Ministry Training programme.
Times of emotional and psychological wilderness will come, whether we wish it or not. For many people they may happen several times during the course of their lives. We approach such times unwillingly but we cannot avoid them, and if we fail to encounter them honestly, we cannot grow.
Today many people aspire to be happy as much of the time as possible, and there are many seductive promises made by a secular culture, but life cannot always be like this.
It is not difficult to think of times of trial: a relationship rejection, loss of a career dream, a serious illness or a bereavement. We feel abandoned, rootless, and unequal to the pain of the situation. Why has this happened? How can we survive as we were? Frequently, we cannot. We have to face our desperate feelings and express them openly to God.
We may also feel that we are alone in our suffering. What is to be done with this loneliness, so common to the wilderness, or a veritable wilderness in itself? CS Lewis wrote of God that:
“He whispers to us in our joys, speaks to us in our conscience and shouts to us in our pain”.
The pain of our loneliness is a way in which God seeks our attention. He wants us to become aware that we are not in fact alone, but that there is someone beyond ourselves who cares for us deeply and will always be there. This is where faith begins, when we feel fearful and alone.
We can approach this belief in God’s loving provision by simply looking at the beautiful, complex world He has created for us to live in, and by reflecting on the incarnation of that love through His sending of His son to participate in our sorrows. A real human being who suffered, was rejected and then crucified for no justifiable reason.
God can hear our laments at the injustice of life, as the psalmists testify. They cry out in the pain of their wilderness, authentically questioning and expressing their distress:
“My soul is in deep anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?” Psalm 6.3
And yet David ends this psalm on a note of confidence and trust, having believed that God has heard and accepted his prayer.
God’s heart is open to us and He wants us to come close to him in our distress. The peace and joy of God’s presence is, paradoxically, part of the way of the Cross. If you don’t enter the lonely wilderness, it is impossible to find this out.
It is in such situations that we can come to love and trust Him, even when He is not acting as we hoped, or where His will is not clear, or even when He seems not to be working.
We can trust that when He says, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even till the end of time’, He is speaking the truth. In God’s time, new life will come and we can begin again.
