Into the Wilderness

Many times we walk into a wilderness moment in our life without realizing we are there.  There is no sign on the road of our spiritual journey that says, "Warning.  Wilderness Area."  Life can be a very occupying thing.  We get so occupied with all the things it requires of us that we often find ourselves out there in the middle of a dry and arid and empty spiritual place without even being conscious that we have arrived.  Someone once said, "The Holy Spirit could leave the church and it would not recognize it for years.  It would just go on like it always has without missing a beat."  So, it is with our spiritual living.

 

It is not as if we suddenly decide to do away with our spiritual stuff.  We still attend worship each Sunday.  Our Bibles continue to be read and we pray.  We do the stuff that we have been programmed to do as Christians, but it is not filling us, but only adding to the growing sense of emptiness.  And at first, we are likely to attribute the emptiness to the other things of our life such as the nine to five hours or some relationship issues.  It is only at the point that we come to an awareness that the real issue is a spiritual issue that we begin to see the markings of the wilderness around us. 

 

Even though we are doing all the right stuff, we can still be losing out on our connection to God.  What really causes the dis-connect, the dis-ease in our spirit is not external, but internal.  To find ourselves in a wilderness moment is to realize that we have, perhaps, through carelessness, disconnected ourselves from the God we claim to have as the center of our lives.  It is a frightening place to wake up.  With panic we try to figure out what to do which is, of course, exactly the wrong response.  The wilderness is not the place of practicing spiritual self-reliance, but learning about radical dependency on God.