Lent 2
Lent: Living in the Wilderness
The season of Lent has a lot to do with wilderness. Designed to imitate the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, Lent includes the 40 days (minus Sundays) between Ash Wednesday and Easter. In this season we are invited to enter instead of avoid wilderness. We are encouraged to embrace discomfort, instead of letting it be a deterrent...trusting that there is life there.
Scripture Reading: Exodus 16:1-26
In this passage we are hear about the first days of the Israelite’s journey in the desert. God instructs Moses who instructs the people about the daily food that will be provided for them: manna and quail. God provides for them in a way that is intended to build their trust. What do you notice about the way in which God provides for them? How have you learned to trust that God will provide? Notice the ways in which the Israelite’s obey and don’t obey. Their responses indicate how whether or not they are trusting God.
Practice:
We invite you to embrace the wilderness experience during this Lenten season.
This week, we suggest choosing the spiritual practice of simplicity. This practice cultivates trust and dependence on God rather than things. You also might find it cultivates gratitude, in contrast to the grumbling attitude we see in the Israelites.
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun defines this important spiritual practice: Simplicity cultivates the great art of letting go. Simplicity aims at loosening inordinate attachment to owning and having. Simplicity brings freedom and with it generosity. She sums up the goal of simplicity as: “to uncomplicate and untangle my life so I can focus on what really matters.” In her book Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us, Calhoun goes on to write:
Jesus teaches us that freedom is not found in having and doing but in keeping God and his will first in our heart. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-21
Jesus wants us to know that we don’t need all the things or experiences we think we do. What we really need is to keep first things first—Jesus and his kingdom. Life becomes much simpler when one thing matters most.
Simplicity creates margins and spaces and openness in our lives. It honors the resources of our small planet. It offers us the leisure of tasting the present moment. Simplicity asks us to let go of the tangle of wants so we can receive the simple gifts of life that cannot be taken away.
Try one or more of theses suggestions given by Calhoun:
assessing the things and activities that keep life convoluted, complicated, and confusing; working to simplify these things
setting priorities that flow from loving God above all else
downsizing possessions
cutting back on shopping and discretionary spending
eating simple foods
enjoying simple pleasures that require no expense
removing distractions and preoccupation with things
Stories from the Wilderness
Each week this blog page includes a story, written by one of our elders, in which they reflect on a wilderness experience in their life.
The story this week is written by Scott Bockstruck.
Wilderness is a major theme in scripture that has both negative and positive implications. It can be a place of testing, punishment and temptation or a place of refuge and hearing from God. In each situation wilderness is a place that is challenging because it is very different from what’s typical.
He fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you and in the end to do you good. - Deuteronomy 8:16
In the summer of 1989, Zenita, I and our 18 month old son spent six weeks leading a team of four University students through a summer immersion experience in the Hilltop area of Tacoma. We lived together in a run down apartment complex next door to the Eastside Community Church of God in Christ who was hosting us.
The vision for our time was to displace ourselves from our typical comfortable, safe, white, wealthy, university community and see God through a totally different lens.
The first week it felt like a wilderness… Our apartment was hot, humid and for security reasons, we couldn’t open the windows. We were sleeping on air mattresses. We were purposely limiting our food budget and figuring out as a married couple, a baby and students how to live in community. Neighborhood kids were constantly knock on our doors to play with us. We went to church four times a week where everything was new to us - the really long services, the music, the very active pentecostal worship style, people coming in off the street to ask for help getting baby formula and diapers, and we were very much the minority.
God was humbling and testing us…. But as we opened our hearts God began to show us how good this place was. This small church was loving each other and their neighbors deeply - they had a food bank, school, drug and alcohol rehab center and a day care. A group of sisters would make a big pot of spaghetti and visit crack houses and feed gang members. We worked and worshiped along side of them. These folks had such a vital relationship with God and with each other that worship was a celebration full of singing, clapping, dancing, testimony, prayer and scripture that can’t be constrained by time. Hearing from God and prayer sustained them and we saw God become more real than ever before. As we left Tacoma we stopped to see Scott’s folks. We woke up in the middle of the night to baby Micah repeating names of all the neighborhood kids he had played with and we cried - God had in the end done good to us.
