In the Wilderness

So all week I have had a sticky note stuck to my computer, reminding me to blog about Easter. I'm not sure what it is I originally wanted to write because so many ideas have run through my head this week... so many precious verses and hymns swirl around this time of year. ("Where the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my heart, my all").

I think I have wanted, in some small way, to mark this season with more deliberate action than I usually do. I come from the low-church Protestants; we don't really do the Lenten thing. I know that Jesus told us not to do our works of righteousness before men, and when we fast not to go around moaning and deprived, but rather to put on oil and bright clothes. Nevertheless, I am finding that fasting in some mental and physical ways this week has woken me up to things in a different way than I expected.

For one, I have learned that I'm really bad at fasting! I make a lot of exceptions. I bend "rules" (even if I'm the one who arbitrarily set them!). My intention to spend Maunday Thursday fasting and praying resulted in a day in which I was far less than gracious with people around me, in which I actually locked students OUT of my office because they were driving me nuts, in which I aired my opinions rather forwardly on more than one occasion, and in which I didn't get down to actually praying until minutes before sleep.

The effect of going without food is that that lack is accutely noticeable at all times. I had to have a meeting over lunch during which I sipped tea and watched the others lather sour cream on their blynai. This was the day the staff kitchen was full of delicious smells of baking for most of the afternoon. In short, I spent a lot more time noticing food because I couldn't have it.

This is probably not an uncommon experience. And I know that the goal is to take those hungers we have and practice submitting them to God, practice the crucifixtion in the flesh that we are called to as disciples. But the keener sense I felt in this process was just how much I fail, just how much I am incapable of following through on my committments, just how much my most basic human hungers preoccupy me.

Just as there is physical hunger, I also battle emotional hunger. And when I am around people who seem to be "feasting" on foods I can't have, those same pangs of need are ferocious. Those smells and tastes seem all that much more desireable because I am cut off from them.

This week a friend gave me a book by Elisabeth Elliot, which I have not been able to put down. It's her book, The Path of Loneliness: Finding Your Way through the Wilderness to God. I snatched it up because early in it she quotes the hymn, "O Love that Will Not Let Me Go," which I posted here last week and have been meditating on a lot lately. Loneliness feels like emotional fasting, like going without things the human spirit needs for survival. When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was both alone and hungry. To be like Jesus is to walk through these places.

And I guess that's what I have been thinking about this week - that discipleship will call us to be crucified in the flesh. It will eventually require me to say, "Yes, Lord I will serve You no matter what You give me or do not give me. I do not serve You because I desire blessing, or because of what you promise, but because You are You." Satan would want me to question God's worthiness - to question whether He deserves my life so entirely when there seems to be only pain and learning, pain and learning, pain and learning. And Satan would have us forget Christ's sacrifice which is the daily evidence of God's love. This is what we have been given.

And still I cry for something more when I have been given all this forgiveness, and the honor of serving Him, and the breath of His Spirit indwelling the world, the treasure of being His vessel, of being kept in His hands like a broken-winged bird.

There must be one truth I exclaim 'til my chest cracks with its force - God is worthy, worthy, worthy of my last best breath, my fullest heart, my weakest prayer. He is all that I can trust, the source and reason for joy.