Home / Posts / Jay’s Blog / Jay’s Blog – Embracing the Wilderness

Jay’s Blog – Embracing the Wilderness

Special note: Jay’s Blog is now available in audio form on Spotify. Tune in each week as Dr. Ferguson shares wisdom and personal testimony on topics such as parenting, faith, legacy, and victory in Jesus.

This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of Lent. In the Episcopalian tradition of my birth, we attended services where the priest placed ashes in the sign of a cross on our foreheads. The ashes symbolize grief, repentance, and purification. They also symbolize death, the state that all of us pass through to life.

Lent is a season of preparation leading up to Resurrection Sunday. It lasts for 40 days, a reference to the 40 days Jesus fasted in the wilderness before his ministry, where He was tempted by Satan. The idea of wilderness figures strongly in the Lenten season.

Earlier this week, I was reflecting on Isaiah 40, a passage of Scripture often attributed to John the Baptist’s ministry,

“A voice of one calling:

In the wilderness, prepare

the way for the Lord;

make straight in the desert

a highway for our God.”

As author Pete Grieg notes, the punctuation is important here. For most of my life, I read this passage as “A voice of one calling in the wilderness: Prepare the way for the Lord.” In other words, the voice is calling in the wilderness, when instead, the voice is calling that it’s in the wilderness where we prepare the way for the Lord. Isaiah reinforces this reading with the next sentence, commanding us to “make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Throughout Scripture, the wilderness is a place of refining, stripping down, drawing near to the Lord, and being transformed. In Exodus, Moses flees Egypt to Midian, where he is transformed over 40 years from an entitled, arrogant, violent prince of Egypt into a humbled shepherd, ready to listen to the Lord’s call. Moses leads the people of Israel through their wilderness experience, once again for 40 years of wandering and learning to trust the God who delivered them from Egypt and would lead them to victory over those who held the land God had promised them.

After being threatened by Jezebel, Elijah flees into the wilderness, where God provides for him through the raven. Here, Elijah’s fear is transformed into faith, and he is restored to a new mission. David flees into the wilderness, chased by Saul into the caves of Abdullum, where David learns to trust in the Lord and submit to God’s sovereignty. These lessons, hard fought, will further mold David into a man after God’s heart and anchor his kingship in brokenness and submission before the Lord. In the New Testament, Christ, John the Baptist and Paul all have wilderness experiences at the beginning of their ministries–refining, forging, and anchoring their theologies and their trust in God, who is the source of their belief.

In the early church, a number of dedicated followers of Jesus, eager to escape the excesses of what then-modern Christianity had become, fled into the wilderness to seek purity of spirit and heart in Jesus. By this time, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire and was already being co-opted and compromised by those who tried to wield its power for their own benefit. Others fled the distractions of material wealth. They traveled to the deserts of Roman Egypt and Syria to establish communities. The first of these refugees from society was Paul of Thebes, and the most famous was Anthony the Great. These men and women were known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and by the fourth century, thousands had fled into the wilderness to seek deeper intimacy with Jesus.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers renounced the material wealth and pleasures of the day, allowing themselves to be stripped down and focused on prayer, singing, Scripture reading, fasting, giving alms to the poor, and solitude. They drew people from all over the empire who gained from their instruction, prayers, and wisdom. They changed the world by serving gently and humbly, acting as the precursor for all the Christian monastic movements that would follow.

Throughout Scripture, wilderness experiences are rarely chosen and are never comfortable, and yet those who undertake them always emerge sanctified and stronger. The Lord uses the wilderness to reveal the heart, including those things that bind us too closely to the world around us. As disciples of Jesus, we live best in the world as exiles and aliens, loving the world around us but set apart from it (the meaning of “saints”). The wilderness reveals those things we hold onto too tightly and frees our grip from them.

The wilderness reveals our false securities, those things in which we place our identity, our peace, our security, all of which are really just numbing devices, providing distraction but never true rest. It teaches us dependence on the Lord when there is nothing else to hold onto. Finally, the wilderness binds us more tightly to Jesus, as we cling to Him after everything else has been stripped away.

Unlike the Desert Fathers, the wilderness isn’t usually about geography, about heading off somewhere, but about what happens within us. We often think that if we can avoid the pain and difficult circumstances in our lives, we can somehow have the space and bandwidth to become more intimate with God. We ask ourselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, as if following Christ were made up of a series of individual, atomized decisions, rather than a lifetime of walking in the same direction, often through the wilderness. What if the way to intimacy with Jesus is through stepping into and through the pain?

I find myself walking through life with a baseline of grief, a heaviness that comes from years of loving and working with the people of Jesus. I have tremendous joy, and I love my life, but the grief never leaves. Recently, the heaviness has become greater with the loss of my father, not only missing him but losing a part of my identity as the son of someone, and coming to terms with someone who played such a seminal role in who I am, a mirror or lens through whom I saw myself. This, coupled with the weight I feel for my people at Grace and their individual pain and struggles in the faith, my daughters and their adult decisions, and the natural transitions for my life, career, and marriage as I age, all bring pain that I’m grateful to bear, but that are themselves stripping, refining, and transforming. They are all working together by God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit to make me into something I was not before, something new.

Rather than avoiding the pain or trying to “work through the grief,” I am going to succumb to it. Not be swallowed by it, defeated in it, or consumed, but surrendering to it so that the Lord can use it to its maximum effect in me. Refining me, revealing and burning off what doesn’t belong, so that what’s left is what He desires for me. So that I can be all God created me to be, so that I can love Him and you better and more.

Lent is a season for embracing the wilderness within our hearts, making straight a pathway for God in our lives. It’s a season for stepping into the pain and shedding the dangers of American Christianity (when the emphasis is on the adjective over the noun), consumerism, doomscrolling, and whatever else holds us captive. It’s a time for doing the deep work of revealing what entangles us and drags us down, and asking the Lord to cut it off. A time for solitude, fasting, deep prayer, meditating on Scripture, and practicing those things we’ve said we’d try and haven’t yet integrated into our lives. Lent is for pressing into Jesus and remembering that in Him is everything.

Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.