I sat on the step of the minibus, my face burnt within minutes of climbing out and stared in awe at the desert.
The view was of a harsh, unrelenting landscape. There was nothing but dust and rock for as far as you could see yet it seemed the most beautiful view I had seen in a long, long time.
I’d felt an anticipation rising in me way before we had arrived here by the side of the Jordon. “Will I know it’s the desert?” I asked the priest driving the bus, “you’ll know” he replied with a wisdom I couldn’t yet grasp.
Here we were, it didn’t disappoint, it was everything I had pictured. Maybe a recollection from a children’s story bible from years before. I had to just drink it in, the hostility of the landscape not preventing me seeing the beauty.
As an audible question to God, I said “why do I find this place so beautiful?” The priest behind me answered, perhaps for a sacred second in persona Christi “ because it’s where we meet God”
I hadn’t thought of somewhere so void of growth and life as being where we could possibly meet God. But without doubt it was becoming a place of deep encounter for me.
At this spot Jesus had been baptised by John the Baptist just before wandering this wilderness for forty days. Forty days of nothing but the Father, stripped of every comfort and distraction but Him. There is no where to hide in this landscape, no bush to hide your nakedness, your vulnerability, or stifle the base need that cries out from your heart that you silence with worldly panaceas. A voice that cries out from our own personal wilderness.
Suddenly I got it, in a way I never could without the visual picture, there’s an integrity in the starkness, it doesn’t promise anything it won’t deliver, there’s no comfort in the ‘could be’. What you see is what it is. Stripped bare reality.
What it does deliver, this desert physically and spiritually is HIM. And that is all our hearts in their very essence desire. In this moment, the last two years of struggle made sense. The trial, the hardship is not something that is a barrier to be overcome in order to find Him again, it’s the very vehicle that drives us deep, deep into Him.
Here, in the hardship and pain is where he waits for us with a depth of encounter that is hidden in the safe and comfortable places. His undoubtable presence here makes you long for the desert in a way a rational mind can’t comprehend. It’s here you embrace the cross because of a grace given love for the one who is nailed upon it. It’s here you seek the cross because you know it’s where above all places you will find Him.
He doesn’t lead us here to dwell forever, but just long enough to be forever changed. Lord take me to that hard place.
