There was a point in my healing journey where I likened it to being dropped in the middle of a field full of thorns. There was no avoiding it, whichever way I turned would be painful. Facing and dealing with those things in my past that were keeping me there (in my past) was not a comfortable place to be. But I wasn't comfortable where I was, either, hence the move.
Over a period of time I had developed strategies to manage and deal with my negative perceptions of myself, including a great big wall of self-protection, and while this was, at some level, effective at keeping the bad at bay, it was not living. More significantly, it kept everything and everyone out. It was a place of isolation and desolation. Like the proverbial child with my fingers in my ears, singing “lalalalala I can’t hear you”, with my eyes tightly shut, I could pretend that all was well. Except that it wasn't.
More recently, I saw another aspect of this game of pretence that again, is about self-protection, but this time against disappointment and disillusionment with what God is doing (or not).
We are in the midst of a series looking at wilderness experiences at church. The other week, our pastor finished with the idea that we can try to make our wilderness experience more comfortable. Being the bad girl that I am, I immediately got a picture of myself sitting in the desert in my comfy armchair with my feet up, a nice cool drink and the air conditioner going full bore.
The problem was, though, that I could see some truth in it. Having been in the waiting room for quite some time, there is a little (ok, maybe a lot) of tendency to give up and stop expecting to ever get to the Promised Land. After all, every time it looks like we are about to move, I pack up and get ready to go, only to take one or two steps and stop again, unpack and settle in for some more waiting. And so, I may as well be comfortable while I wait.
At this point, I can hear all the answers starting to rev up. My husband’s favourite is the “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” I am also well aware of my proclivity to focus on the situation instead of God. I loved a comment in a discussion group the other day about Ezekiel’s dry bones. The point was that too often we focus on the dead, dry bones instead of what God is doing with them – breathing LIFE into them!
However, I leave these, and other thoughts about what we learn in the wilderness behind to focus back on the idea of our contentment here. As I reflected on my picture of myself and my creature comforts in the desert, I wondered if there might not be some truth in the idea that many of our “churches” may be living in this place too. What gets us into this position?
Imagine what it was like for the Israelites after 40 years. There was a whole generation that had never known anything but the wilderness. Relocating to the Promised Land was scary, confronting, moving into the great unknown. Coming back to my earlier point, we know how to operate in the wilderness, how to survive, how it works. As much as we dream of and talk about all the possibilities and excitement of the Promised Land, we are not sure that we want to let go of our security of the known, as ordinary and barren as it is.
To make the point blatant, I have heard people say (and read it elsewhere), that the church cannot expect to operate in the ways that it did back in the book of Acts, and even that God does not move in those ways any more. Some will go as far as to say that gifts such as prophecy, healing, tongues and their interpretation, miracles and so on were only for that time, and that now we have the Bible, we don’t need those things anymore.
On the other hand, most people I know would disagree vehemently with these thoughts. But perhaps we dress up our wilderness a little differently. It might be rituals and traditions, or maybe it is up to the minute music and polished performances and the latest technology. Let's do what we can to hide from the idea that we not quite in the Promised Land yet.
However, even when we do operate from a position where we like the idea of seeing God’s Kingdom and life breaking out in wonderful, obvious, abundant ways, I wonder whether, when it boils down to it, it can all be a bit confronting, a bit disconcerting. And because we cannot control it, much less understand it, we would rather step back into the wilderness, where, although it is pretty boring and nothing much spectacular happens, it is predictable and comfortable. Well, almost.
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