Finding God in the Wilderness Places

Band-Aids in Prison

Band-Aid theology requires that you and I stuff our pain into internal compartments—just outside of our emotional awareness but still able to deeply impact us. Like the Israelites in Egypt, we live with a functional denial of our present reality. For Israel that reality was forced labor, genocide, and slavery. For us, in our technologically driven, 24/7 culture, it is a thousand different things.

Band-Aids come in all shapes and sizes. We look for love in a one-night stand. We look for acceptance in an air-tight reputation. We look for satisfaction in a bottle of Jack Daniels. We look for transcendence in a hit of ecstasy. But all are temporary fixes for a deeper longing.

The True Story of Your Life

The Bible roots our core identity in God’s original intention for humanity as described in the first two chapters of Genesis. This is the true story of our lives. At Sinai, God sings the lullaby that echoes that original true story. He whispers to his little children, “You are my treasured possession.” He speaks words of dignity and glory that an enslaved people long to hear. Sinai represents that moment in each of our lives when it begins to dawn on us that we are more than we seem to be, more than merely ordinary. As we leave our many Egypts throughout the course of our lives, we continually find ourselves at Sinai, the identity checkpoint where we’re retold the true story about ourselves.

The Futility of Figuring It Out

Our idols are touchstones of the transcendent. They give us a sense of control, of access, of intimacy and connection. It would be easy to point the finger at Israel if we didn’t have a hundred different ways of manufacturing a sense of security in our own lives. We’ve got shopping therapy or chocolate therapy. We find the transcendent in a bottle of wine or in a moment of false intimacy through pornography. We seek security in wealth, in academic credentials, in reputation. When left unsatisfied, our longing for the transcendent leads to a frantic search for a more expedient way. We long for something we can touch, taste, see — and control. And let’s face it, expediency has become epidemic.

The Exodus story is predicated on waiting, and the Exodus story is our story too. It is the Christian story. We wait on a God who says, “Just a little while longer. . .” And in the midst of our pain, the small satisfaction of a golden calf often feels better than seemingly endless waiting.

Disobedient Obedience

The Pharisees’ brand of disobedient obedience may seem like a proper response to a holy God, but it actually closes us off to the covenant grace that most deeply characterizes God’s relationship with us. It sucks the life out of us, cutting us off from parts of ourselves that need to be exposed to the light of God’s love. The law, by itself, was never meant to be the answer to our needs. When we seek wholeness through external conformity to the law, we miss its real point. Eugene Peterson takes a bit of liberty in his translation of Romans 8, but makes a point nonetheless: “The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us” (Romans 8:4, The Message).

In other words, while the law is good, it does not bring the real healing our hearts need because none of us are capable of keeping it perfectly. If we mistake obedience to the law for wholeness and righteousness, we get outward conformity instead of the wholehearted love that motivates true obedience.

Kleenex Theology

In the wilderness, we experience the darkness most profoundly. Yet, in Christian subcultures where suffering may be interpreted as a lack of faith we learn to disguise our pain, conveying a false self that betrays who we really are and what we’re really feeling. As it turns out, humans have been doing this for millennia. Faced with the tortuous theological ramblings of his fix-it friends, Job rejects their Kleenex theology: “My brothers are as undependable as intermittent streams. . . . Now you too have proved to be of no help; you see something dreadful and are afraid. . . . Teach me, and I will be quiet; show me where I have been wrong. How painful are honest words! But what do your arguments prove? Do you mean to correct what I say, and treat my desperate words as wind?” (Job 6:15, 21, 24-26, NIV).

Job needed friends to engage the pain, not interpret the pain. He needed friends who would join the chorus of lament, not offer a recipe for a more faithful life. In the end, Job is commended for his honesty while his theologically correct buddies are scolded for their insensitivity. God does not want us to disguise ourselves, hiding the pain we feel so deeply.

Open Hands

Although we wrap our clenched fists around all kinds of things—people and substances, money and sex—I often think that something else lurks beneath. It feeds on fear, taking over in times when insecurity and uncertainty abound. It’s as old as the Garden of Eden and as present to you and me as our current clenched fist. The king of clenched fists is our need to control.

We know we are emerging from the wilderness when we experience a more continual, consistent freedom from the need to possess. The wilderness feels more like a battleground, while this stage of the journey feels more like the deep exhale after being underwater for a minute. No doubt old cravings will rise up, tugging at your heart for attention. But it becomes easier to say no. Having been refined in the wilderness, we know the geography of our addicted hearts, and we discover we’re more able to slip past an old enemy.

It’s Your Choice

Your first choice – directed back toward Egypt – is characterized by neurosis, anxiety, depression, shame, addiction. Clients will say, “I just don’t feel like myself.” This is practically a definition of neurosis — we’re not ourselves. Instead we’re captured by some thought, emotion, or attachment that enslaves the heart, cutting off our connection to self, others, and God. All of us have experienced this in one way or another. It doesn’t mean that we’re crazy; it doesn’t even necessarily mean that we need counseling. It means that we’re in need of rescue, release, and redemption.

The second is characterized by theosis – turning to God – an experience of deep connection and relationship as it was intended to be, a life of union and transcendence. That’s what the apostle Paul was talking about when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).