A few summers ago my three sons and I undertook the ultimate road trip: a 9,300-mile venture from Zionsville to Alaska and back. Every stage of our trip went according to plan until we reached the Yukon Territory on our way home. There were wildfires in the area – more than one thousand of them, we later learned.
We pulled into the town of Watson Lake and noticed that a barricade had been stretched across the Alaska Highway. It was Monday afternoon. “We’ve had to close the road for a while because of the fires,” a highway worker told us. “When do you think it might reopen?” I asked, still hoping to arrive at our scheduled stop for the evening. “Oh…it should reopen by Thursday,” he said.
Even though the thought of spending 72 hours in a small village in the Yukon was fascinating in a certain horror movie kind of way, we decided to take our chances by backtracking to the only other road in that part of North America. It was a bad road. We saw wildfires burning right along its shoulder. Small reminders of civilization appeared at about fifty-mile intervals. Our cell phones were useless. Nevertheless things were going remarkably well – until we blew a tire on the rough surface.
There in the middle of the evergreen wilderness we met what can only be described as the Army Rangers of the mosquito world. While my son Mark changed the tire – I made sure to stand back and give him plenty of room – the mosquitoes descended on us as if were a long-awaited buffet. Impervious to bug spray, they went down our socks. They ventured behind my glasses. We drove off knowing we were now one more blowout away from being stranded without communication in the presence of mosquitoes that were imagining how they might use us as a future illustration.
To be honest, we were scared. We drove almost 24 hours straight, stopping only for gas, staying up most of the night inventing games to entertain whoever happened to be driving. Today, however, without hesitation, all four of us would say that that turned out to be the best part of the trip. We would concur with G.K. Chesterton, who said that an adventure is just an inconvenience misunderstood, and an inconvenience is just an adventure misunderstood. So often it is the unplanned stretch of road that generates the most lasting impressions and teaches the most important lessons.
Are you on such a road today? Do you feel as if you are walking through a wilderness? You never planned on having cancer; or losing your job after age 50; or having someone you love tell you that they don’t love you anymore. What assurances do we have? Only this one: We never go down such roads alone. God is always present with those who cry out for his love and his gift of hope.
To be fair, all wildernesses are not created equal. Sometimes we enter personal wastelands because we have stumbled through our own foolishness. Sometimes we suffer because of the actions of others. Jesus journeyed to the desert so his loyalty to God could be tested to the fullest degree. And we cannot overlook the reality that wasteland experiences are sometimes an outright punishment. The first year or so of Israel’s time in the Sinai was a God-designed spiritual classroom. But the next 38 years of wilderness wandering represented a judgment for failing to trust God.
For all its value as an opportunity for growth, however, the spiritual desert is not a place for weekend camping trips. Our goal must be to walk through it. Where is our hope that such a thing is possible? We find this refrain in Psalm 42:
- Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God
For I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
People of faith frequently conclude that the arid seasons of life turn out to be some of the best years of life. God teaches magnificently in the wasteland. It was in the wilderness that David, Elijah, and Moses had to choose between bitterness and trust. Would they become cynical about God’s promises, or renew their hope that God alone was faithful?
As we learn to keep company with God, we learn to see reality differently. Perhaps we began our spiritual journey years ago by thinking, “I want God to help me.” Increasingly we found ourselves counting on God’s positive response to our yearnings for signs of his favor: “I want God to bless me.” We may even have collected books and sermons and retreats to reinforce the goodness and rightness of that desire.
But then came a time in the wilderness. Gradually another possibility – raw and difficult – began to emerge. We began to imagine crying out, “I want God to be God. I want God not for what he will do to make me happy, but because walking with God is itself the greatest human happiness.” Keeping company with God in a barren time of life is a graduate education in learning not to cling to God’s blessings, but to cling to God alone. It may not be the road we ever intended to take, but it’s the pathway to some of life’s deepest happiness.
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