Into the Wild

In Christian ministry, one of the greatest struggles I hear from the faithful is in "connecting with God." Many times, honest people sit in my office or over the table at lunch and speak to me about how they don't feel God or feel like they're not connecting with Him in any significant way. This always makes my heart sink.

As an aside, many people have absurd expectations for communion with God and think that, as a pastor, I experience some high level of supernatural revelation constantly. If I have not been clear enough in my tone, this is simply not the case. But we were made to be in communion with God; knowing him and feeling his love, presence, and kindness. So how do I answer these people?

Obviously it's a pretty case by case thing, but there tends to be one common place where everyone has the opportunity to meet this everlasting, all-powerful, fully-loving God. And it's a place where not many want to go, where people are hesitant to travel to. In fact, this place tends to be a place we avoid at all costs.

That place is the Wild.

I'm not talking about the forest and I'm not talking about a place filled with the freshness of life and biological potential and I'm certainly not speaking literally. I'm talking about a Wild of Biblical proportions, perhaps better thought of as the desert.

The Wild is unknown. The Wild is bare. The Wild is life-taking. The Wild is unprotected.

It's the place you would least expect to meet a God and that's exactly why it is the place where you meet this God.

It's where Abraham met Him, it's where Jacob wrestled with Him, it's where Moses got a name for Him and it's where the entire nation of Israel finally found Him. The only way to know that God is all you need is when God is all that you've got.

This project of 20th/21st century first-world life called America fights against this with everything its got. We reject the Wild because the Wild is uncomfortable, the Wild is unknown, and most frightening: the Wild strips us down to our very core and dries up our resources. We spend our lives building houses, making money, and putting on a face that will let the world know that we are not ever going into the Wild because it will kill us. But in all actuality, it just might save us.

That's why it shouldn't be such a shock to know that the Good News begins not in a major metropolis and not with a King naming his prince to be an heir to the throne, but it starts with,

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

You want to connect with this God? Next time you're sent to the Wild, spend less time looking to find yourself and more time looking for Him. It'll still be frightening, perhaps more frightening than your last trip there, but you might just come back knowing someone who has mastered such a place as the Wild.