What is A Good Wilderness?
Why I'm here and why I hope you'll stay.
A Good Wilderness started with a conversation around our kitchen table.
It was early evening, ten or so years ago. My husband Jon and I were visiting with my sister-in-law Jen. The dining room light glowed over the oak table, holding back the growing darkness that pressed against the windows. Jon and I were reminiscing about life and its crosses, mainly ones that we had lived through at our church and in our home. Many of our memories were full of our own folly and sinfulness, but they also included those of others.
Our hands rested on the golden wood, clasping coffee cups and water glasses as we talked. Gradually, we moved to what we had learned through our experiences, with the benefit of time and slow changes behind us. Everything we had lived through had been God’s to give, very specifically and particularly to us. Though our crosses had been heavy, even if we had had the ability, we would not want to go back in time to avoid or soften any of them. He used our mistakes and those of others to teach us. Through our trials, Christ had given us grace and mercy in ways we had not known or understood before they had occurred.
Through Him, we were slowly emerging from the hardest times. Jon and I still felt bruised and lonely. We knew we would live with the scars of our experience for the rest of our lives. But we also knew that God had used them for our good. After years of tears and struggle, joys and blessings, all of them mixed up together, we had realized in our own lives how the Lord gives and He takes away. Yet always, “blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). We were, finally, glad that we had suffered.
Jen had listened to us carefully. Then she said something I will never forget. “So you live in a wilderness. But it’s a good wilderness.”
A good wilderness.
That phrase has echoed through my mind for years. It captures the often brambly, thorny, and bleak reality of our sinful, hard world that contrasts with the perfect world Christians will have in our life to come. As long as our bodies endure this mortal coil, we are in the wild, knowing it is where we must be until such time that God calls us home or Jesus comes again. And though our fallen earth is savage, Christ is with us now, and He will come again. Our situation was a microcosm of how God works with both His rod and His staff on all of us. Sinners stumbling around in a fallen world never lack His steadfast love. This makes our, and your, wilderness good.
We know this from the words in Isaiah, prophesying of John the Baptist, the last prophet and the man pointing to Christ, our God made Man:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord;
Make straight in the desert
A highway for our God.
4 Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and hill brought low;
The crooked places shall be made straight
And the rough places smooth;
5 The glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
And all flesh shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”6 The voice said, “Cry out!”
And he said, “What shall I cry?”“All flesh is grass,
And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades,
Because the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
Surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of our God stands forever” (40:3-8, NKJV).
That’s a bleak reality: we are all grass. But we know God has done the work to spare us from fading back into the dust from which we are formed. He stands forever, and we will, too. He has not left us alone in the wilderness.
Interestingly, and not coincidentally, Lutherans are indebted to Martin Luther’s insistence on four “alones.” As Pastor Stephen Preus wrote, sinners are “justified through grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), for the sake of Christ alone (sola Christus), a truth revealed to us in Scripture alone (sola Scriptura).” God alone is the One who earns and gives us what we need, and what we need is salvation. Rather than working for our own justification and meriting righteousness of our own accord, we understand that we are born sinful and are unable in any way to reach God ourselves (Romans 3:23). And with our sinfulness, we live in the pattern of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio; prayer, meditation, and temptation. As the Rev. Dr. John Kleinig writes in his beautiful book, Grace Upon Grace:
Luther proposed an evangelical pattern of spirituality as reception rather than self-promotion. This involves three things: prayer, meditation, and temptation. All three revolve around ongoing, faithful attention to God’s Word. The order of the list is significant, for unlike that traditional pattern of devotion, the spiritual life begins and ends here on earth. These three terms describe the life of faith as a cycle that begins with prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit, concentrates on the reception of the Holy Spirit through meditation on God’s Word, and results in spiritual attack. This, in turn, leads a person back to further prayer and intensified meditation. Luther, therefore, does not envisage the spiritual life as a process of self-development, but as a process of reception from the triune God. This process of reception turns proud, self-sufficient individuals into humble beggars before God.
In other words, the struggle that is normal in our fallen world falls upon Christians particularly hard. We receive Christ and His gifts through faith imparted to us by the Holy Spirit, and we will fall under attack, both internally and externally. We live with anfechtung, that terrific and terrible German word that describes the torment and affliction our souls suffer and wrestle with. This is part of our earthly experience, living with the particular crosses we are given. Yet we are not left to fend for ourselves, drowning in a kind of temptation holding tank.
As I reflect again upon that conversation with Jon and Jen, I see that the details of our situation aren’t particularly important now. What’s important is how Christ always provides for and saves us. We came to learn this and continue to do so. As I age, I realize how much I can’t rely on myself or things of this world and how desperately I need Christ alone. Pastor Kleinig explains this spiritual journey:
In our human lives, growing up involves the gradual shift from dependence to independence. But the reverse is true for us spiritually. On our journey we become more and more dependent on Christ for everything in every situation. We do not then proceed from childhood to adulthood; we move forward into spiritual childhood as we grow in faith and become people of prayer.
I started a blog, A Good Wilderness, in 2018 to explore this. I wrote as a confessional Lutheran in Wyoming, as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend, to discuss life, usually mundane and small, as a simultaneous sinner and saint. I wanted to encourage other Lutherans—and anyone else—to lift up our heads (Psalm 24:7) in the midst of our crosses. I blogged with Lutheran insights and resources to inspire others in their families, their churches, and their communities to cling to Christ and to receive His mercy and eternal gifts, no matter what the wilderness held. Now, I’m moving that project from my now-extinct blog to Substack. The Substack model gives writers the ability to, well, write—without dealing with the logistics and headaches of website maintenance. Those burdens contributed to my lack of writing in the last year, and I’m excited to be able to write here regularly, hopefully once a week or so. Please expect some muddy roads along the way (like the road leading to the Esterbrook Chapel above), but ultimately content that points to Christ.
I’m grateful that you’re joining me as I continue to become like a begging little child in faith. May we look with hope together to Christ in this good wilderness.
To God the Holy Spirit let us pray
For the true faith needed on our way
That He may defend us when life is ending
And from exile home we are wending.
Lord, have mercy!
–“To God the Holy Spirit Let Us Pray,” #768 v.1
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