Are You Wasting Your Wilderness?

“I wonder what would happen if we had a deep conversation . . .”

The comment catches me off guard because we’re really just casual friends. 

What kind of deep conversation, I wonder. 

I never find out because it never comes up again. 

Maybe they were never meant to be more than just casual words tossed into casual conversation. 

Forgettable chit chat. 

So I do. 

Forget them.

Until they unexpectedly start sounding like something the Lord might be saying to me.

And you.

But for now I shift my focus to the day’s reading in Jeremiah.

In a nutshell, this is a book of messages for Israel.

Judgment and hope, correction and comfort.

Up and down.

And up and down some more.

Which feels, for me, a little like a seesaw.

Until the seesaw halts.

Frozen in midair by a verse.

“The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness.” 

(Jeremiah 31:2 NKJV)

Finding grace is a beautiful picture.

But in the wilderness? I don’t picture beauty there.

Dictionary.com defines wilderness exactly the way I picture it:

tract of wasteland

Perhaps you are in a personal wilderness season.

But in a general sense, we’re all in the wilderness.

Don’t stop reading, I promise this is good news.

When Adam and Eve are exiled out of the Garden, they are exiled into the wilderness.

Where humanity exists to this day.

All of life is a journey through that wilderness.

Finding our way back to the Garden. 

But tract of wasteland is not the Hebrew understanding of wilderness.

At all.

In fact, the root of the Hebrew word for wilderness means to speak.

Wildernesses and conversations don’t seem to go together.

But, as it turns out, they cannot be separated.

Wilderness literally means place of wording.

A place, or the place, where God speaks.

The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness.

(Psalm 29:8)

God speaks to the Israelites in the wilderness, turning it into a place of holy conversations.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, the wilderness seems fine for those ancient Israelites . . . but how does this apply to me?”

So Jesus begins a parable . . .

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?

(Luke 15:4 NKJV)

Do you see it?

It’s not the lost sheep who is in the wilderness.

It’s the ninety-nine.

Doing life there with the Shepherd.

Flourishing under His care.

And likely engaging in all sorts of Shepherd-to-sheep conversations.

Until one wanders off.

Revealing the heart of the Shepherd.

To return that lost sheep to the wilderness. 

To the place of wording.

Where she will be close enough to hear His voice.

In the wilderness we find, like those in Jeremiah’s message, God’s grace.

And His voice.

A rabbi’s quote is copied into my journal:

Only in the silence of the wilderness can the sound beneath sound be heard.

A place to listen . . . and respond.

Not a wasteland after all.

But sometimes wasted.

I wonder what would happen if we had a deep conversation there . . .

See you in a couple weeks.

Love,