In the summer of 1989 all across London England signs on billboards and bus shelters began to appear like this (This poster can be seen and used as a slide here: http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/exhibits/Posters/04item08.html ) asking the question “Can anyone make sense of ot?” for many weeks it got people talking what are those signs about, what does it mean. And then over night another sign appeared like this (This poster can be seen and used as a slide here: http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/exhibits/Posters/04item09.html ) with the tag line, “come and hear one man who can make some sense of it.” It was an advertizing campaign for a Billy Graham mission that was coming to the city.
What I find curious is that while all of us have life and live life, for many life is punctuated with times of profound confusion. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell references a study done by the people who created Sesame Street in which children were observed as they watched the show to see when they turned their heads and lost interest. The study showed children lost interest in the show, not when there wasn’t something exciting happening on screen, or there were boring characters, but when they didn’t understand what was happening. In other words, if they did not understand the story, even if it were a mini story of bringing two halves of a word together, they lost interest and started playing with toys.
Producers tried to remedy the lack of interest by ratcheting up conflict, but this didn’t work. Conflict without a story is still confusing. Interesting characters without a story are confusing as well. The producers at Sesame Street worked hard, then, to make every scene, every segment a very clear story, and because of their work they retain the average child’s engagement an unheard of 80% of the time they are watching the show.
I wonder if we don’t all do the same thing, not with television, but in life. We try to figure out what’s going on but when we can’t, that is when we check out. We distract ourselves. Or, worse, we ratchet up the conflict or numb ourselves with entertainment, because it’s hard to live a life that doesn’t seem to make sense. And while there are so called experts, life coaches and specialists, even they don’t seem to have figured it out.
I don’t know if you saw the March issue of Maclean’s Magazine, but its cover story is about the life experts that Oprah Winfrey has had on her show giving advice. It say, “Oprah’s bad advice: a surprising number of her self-help gurus are now admitting they are total screw-ups.” The article goes on to tell how:
• A spiritual life counselor’s own life spiraled out of control when her life imploded with a marriage that broke up and has her filing for bankruptcy after squandering millions of dollars.
• Another expert who advocates for a simply life, has been outed for her extravagant life style after frittering away her wealth on excessive lavishness, including 9 assistants to help her manage her posh New York real estate, as well as a chapel in England where Sir Isaac Newton once attended.
• Another, a former emotional eater can’t figure out why she now overspends
• A popular marriage counselor now reveals she has been married four times and that even though publicly she claimed she was in a long and happy marriage, she was actually with a man who made her miserable and according to her book, she only has sex with three times in 13 years.
So if we can’t figure it out, and the experts don’t seem to get it right, where do we turn when we can’t make sense of life? Now I’m not at all suggesting that life is always confusing. Sometimes everything seems to go well, we find ourselves in a sustainable rhythm, things work the way they are supposed to, bills are paid on time, we see results from our efforts, our health is on track, we have joy in our routines. Sometimes life is good, there is nothing to interpret, but then there are those other times.
You know the times I mean don’t you? Times when your health takes a turn, when your finances get hit, when your position is eliminated, when your kids no longer need you and you wonder what your purpose is; those times when you feel as if you are wandering.
The Bible tells about the Nation of Israel experiencing a time of wandering. They had escaped the bondage of slavery in Egypt and had crossed the Red Sea into the Sinai wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, but they weren’t there yet. In fact they would wander in that wilderness for 40 years.
That period of wandering was one of the most formative historical times in the life of the nation of Israel. And it is often referred to all throughout the Bible. In the New Testament Paul thinking back to events that took place at this time in the life of the nation of Israel says this, “Now these things occurred as examples…” The wilderness wandering of Israel is an example for us and our lives, especially when we find ourselves wandering in the wilderness. You’ve all witnessed the wilderness haven’t you?
Now of course I don’t mean a literal wilderness. The wilderness is a time between, no longer slaves but not in the Promised Land.
• This past week many students are now free, free from the burden of School as many have graduated. Finally! They have been working at graduating for years! And now they are finding out that while they are free from School, there isn’t a line up of employers waiting to hire them. They are in the wilderness.
• Some people find themselves in the wilderness when disturbing health concerns are finally diagnosed, and now they know what they are dealing with. They are free from speculation and not knowing. A course of health care can be scheduled but they are not yet healthy. The Promised Land is still before them but right now they’re in the wilderness
• The wilderness is entered when an addict admits his addiction. When he sheds light for his family as to why he has such aggressive mood swings, why there never seems to be enough money and why his behaviour has been so erratic. He’s free from the self-deception and the secrecy but he’s not yet at the Promised Land.
• The wilderness can come when you finally make it, you’ve arrived. You’ve got the dream job, you’ve made your first million, you’ve finally been accepted but you’ve had your head down and nose to the grindstone so long, that when suddenly you look up, you find yourself staring into a barren, empty wilderness and you find yourself asking “Is this it?”
Perhaps what makes the wilderness so hard is that it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t seem fair. You would think that having been set free, that good things would automatically come. It just seem right, if someone is courageous enough to admit a fault or a sin or a failing, than they should find that that courage is rewarded by God. But what happens? Wilderness happens. Time spent aimlessly wandering happens.
You understand the wilderness I’m talking about don’t you. You’ve witnessed it haven’t you? The wilderness is when you feel a little lost in what to do next. I heard the story of a local highway department crew who reached their job-site and realizes they have forgotten all their shovels. They didn’t know what to do. So the crew's foreman radios the office and tells his supervisor the
situation. The supervisor radios back and says, "Don't worry, we'll send some shovels... just lean on each other until they arrive."
The wilderness is often uncharted territory; the familiarity of our routines is gone. Often we feel those emotions of helplessness and frustration. All of us have been there at some time or another haven’t we? Some of us are there now.
There are all kinds of wildernesses:
• The vocational wilderness of being between jobs or even between careers
• The financial wilderness of being between cheques, those times when you have to make tough financial decisions that seem like lose/lose propositions.
• There are relationship wildernesses, when the relationship seems stuck
• There are moral wildernesses, when you know it’s wrong but you don’t feel you can stop or even that you want to.
• There are emotional wildernesses, where you feel empty, purposeless, discouraged and you can’t seem to move on.
The paradox to all this is that while we hate the wilderness, and often question if God’s in control and if he knows we’re there, the paradox is that God is the one leading. It was God who brought the nation of Israel into the wilderness. The prophet Jeremiah, when speaking about this time in the life of the nation of Israel describes the wilderness in these words, in Jeremiah 2:6 “…a land of deserts and ravines, a land of drought and utter darkness, a land where no one travels and no one lives?” A land where no one travels and no one lives – no one chooses the wilderness
Sometimes when my wife and I are just about to go to sleep, we’ll already be in bed and she’ll reach to turn of the bedside light and just as she is about to turn it off, I like to fool around and I’ll say “Turn off the light. I command you!” You can imagine that I become very popular at that moment. But here is the strange thing, even though she had already decided to turn off the light for herself, even though it was her choice, the moment I say that guess what she’s not going to do.
You see people like to be in control. And just the thought of giving away control or allowing others to think that they have somehow manipulated us, it grates. We want to shout, “You’re not the boss of me” and deep inside we like to think that we are the masters of our own destiny. And that’s what makes the wilderness so hard to take. It is a stark wake up call to reality; we are reminded that we are not in control. We’ve been led to this place we don’t want to be, but know this; God is leading.
You see the wilderness is never a place we choose for ourselves, no one decides that they’ll go through a time of confusion and direction-less-ness. Nobody who finds themselves in a wilderness then says to themselves, “I think I’ll stay here” I think I like the discomfort and pain of the wilderness. No, like Jeremiah says, the wilderness is a land where no one travels and no one lives.
So why does God allow us to enter the wilderness? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did an experiment some time ago that involved introducing an amoeba into a perfectly stress-free environment: ideal temperature, optimal concentration of moisture, constant food supply. The amoeba had an environment to which it had to make no adjustment whatsoever.
So you would guess this was one happy little amoeba. Whatever it is that gives amoebas ulcers and high blood pressure was gone. Yet, oddly enough, it died.
Apparently there is something about all living creatures, even amoebas, that demands challenge. We require change, adaptation, and challenge the way we require food and air. Comfort alone will kill us.
Think about your own life for a minute and let me ask you this, think to a time which shaped you and forged something positive in your character or life, was that a time of comfort and ease, or a time of wilderness? The wilderness is a time when God does great work in shaping us.
In an on-line article for Leadership journal, John Ortberg discusses how adverse situations are necessary for our spiritual growth. He writes:
Psychologist Jonathon Haidt had a hypothetical exercise: Imagine that you have a child, and for five minutes you're given a script of what will be that child's life. You get an eraser. You can edit it. You can take out whatever you want.
You read that your child will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some kids, will be laborious for yours.
In high school, your kid will make a great circle of friends; then one of them will die of cancer.
After high school this child will actually get into the college they wanted to attend. While there, there will be a car crash, and your child will lose a leg and go through a difficult depression.
A few years later, your child will get a great job—then lose that job in an economic downturn.
Your child will get married, but then go through the grief of separation.
You get this script for your child's life and have five minutes to edit it.
What would you erase?
Wouldn't you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain?
I am part of a generation of adults called "helicopter parents," because we're constantly trying to swoop into our kid's educational life, relational life, sports life, etc., to make sure no one is mistreating them, no one is disappointing them. We want them to experience one unobstructed success after another.
One Halloween a mom came to our door to trick or treat. Why didn't she send in her kid? Well, the weather's a little bad, she said; she was driving so he didn't have to walk in the mist.
But why not send him to the door? He had fallen asleep in the car, she said, so she didn't want him to have to wake up.
I felt like saying, "Why don't you eat all his candy and get his stomach ache for him, too—then he can be completely protected!"
If you could wave a wand, if you could erase every failure, setback, suffering, and pain—are you sure it would be a good idea? Would it cause your child to grow up to be a better, stronger, more generous person? Is it possible that in some way people actually need adversity, setbacks, maybe even something like trauma to reach the fullest level of development and growth?
Friends, if God has lead you to the wilderness it for a reason, a good reason. He is working in you in ways that you may never realize until years later. I’m not saying the wilderness is pleasant, or even necessarily safe, what I’m saying is that it is not purposeless; God is at work doing something good.
The Hebrew word for “wilderness” is midbaar and the root from which this word is derived means “to speak.” Throughout Scripture, God spoke in the wilderness on numerous occasions. In fact, some of His most important messages were offered in the wilderness. The wilderness causes us to face our ultimate questions and personal challenges. God speaks to us in the great silence of the heart. It can be hard to find Christ in the busyness and constantly crowded places. We need solitude. And very often it is in the wilderness, when God has our attention, that he can do His best leading.
In 1940 Harland Sanders was 50 years old, he owned a gas station in Corbin Kentucky and served Fried chicken. Located on a route that most people had to pass through from the north to the south, Colonel Sander’s chicken soon gained a very favourable reputation. I’m sure he was thinking life was going well, and then in the early 1950’s just a few years before retirement a new Interstate was built, the I – 75, which routed people away from Corbin. Eventually the Colonel found it was necessary to sell his business and after paying off his bills he was now forced to live off only his social security cheque.
That was a wilderness time. It came as no fault of his own, it seems as if circumstances lead him there. Why? Why would God allow a man who was doing well to come so near to poverty at his retirement? But you know how the story goes don’t you Confident of the quality of his fried chicken, the Colonel used his first Social Security cheque and traveled across the country by car from restaurant to restaurant, cooking batches of chicken for restaurant owners and their employees. If the reaction was favourable, he entered into a handshake agreement on a deal that stipulated a payment to him of a nickel for each chicken the restaurant sold. By 1964, Colonel Sanders had more than 600 franchised outlets for his chicken in the United States and Canada. That year, he sold his interest in the U.S. company for $2 million to a group of investors. The Colonel remained a public spokesman for the company. In 1976, an independent survey ranked the Colonel as the world's second most recognizable celebrity.
What looked like the darkest days, actually were his most successful. You see God has not brought you to the wilderness without purpose, He is at work. The wilderness is not only where God shapes us it is also his means to guides us in ways that we would not chose for ourselves and yet wish we could get to.
Now let me tell you one more thing about the wilderness, there is a way to get out faster. There are things that we can do to reduce the amount of time we spend there. There are some common pitfalls that we can avoid to keep us from having to constantly walk around in circles. That’s what happened to the Israelites you know. They ended up staying in the wilderness, making mistakes, not doing what would help get them to the Promised Land, but we don’t need to make those same mistakes because like Paul said “…these things occurred as examples…”
I’m wondering if there are some of you who have been a long time in the wilderness, those of you who have witnessed the wilderness, would you like to know what you can do to arrive where God is leading you faster. Would you like to know what mistakes to avoid and what pitfalls to keep away from? Next week we’ll be looking at Wondering in the Wilderness and we’ll explore what God is up to in us during the wilderness times and how we can cooperate with what He is doing.
Let’s pray.
