Wednesday: Ashes in the Desert

4:1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness

Have you ever wondered if Jesus knew when he went to the Jordan to be baptized, that a voice would call down from the heavens and essentially call him to a life that would change the world?

Let’s say for conversation’s sake that he didn’t. Can you imagine how overwhelming a blatant call from God, “hey I like what you’re about, will you do this for me? Will you save my people, my children?”, would be? It’s no small task to change the mind and heart of one person, let alone an entire people. It’s not hard to figure out why Jesus would heed a call of the spirit to the wilderness to fast and meditate.

I can relate to this call, on some level. Whether it’s the spirit calling or my personality, I often feel the need to escape or retreat when overwhelming life situations come my way. The place I most often desire to go is the wilderness, where no one can reach me. In the wilderness I find strength.

Several years ago now, it was June and I was tired. It had been a hard year of many “growing pains”, changing career paths, changing friendships, two deaths and the threat of another, and I felt utterly alone.

A few months before I had come across an advertisement for a summer course in Southern Utah. It was an archeology field course, and having decided that I didn’t want to take a regular science to fulfill my lab science requirements for my degree, I convinced the school to let me count this class. Anthropology after all was one of my minors, and I’ve always loved the idea of digging in the dirt.

I was set to start the course (which was to be a month) in July. It couldn’t have been timed better. When it came time for me to go however, despite the need to leave where I was behind for a while, despite the deep desire I felt to be among things that were unfamiliar, for change, I was terrified. I remember turning to my parents at the airport and asking “What if everybody hates me?” I didn’t actually think this would be the case, but it was the first time I had gone anywhere alone and would be greeted by someone I had never met. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

People often associate the desert with barrenness and death. My experience in the desert of Southern Utah taught me something quite different. I spent a month with out a number of the “conveniences” of life, no cell phone, no email, no running water, no electricity. I lived in a platform tent and slept on a cot. I spent my days in the middle of a field digging in a 4x4 ft trench for pottery shards and storage rooms in 100 degree heat. I made several close friends that month and learned a lot of lessons about life and nature. I left the desert with new clarity and determination and a healing spirit.

There are many stories I could tell about this experience. But perhaps the most appropriate for this time has to do with a stretch of land about 50 feet from the camp that had been covered in a fire the previous month. I remember going to this area to sit for a while one evening. The ground was charred and black, but I don’t remember thinking that it looked dead. There is something very cleansing and healing about ashes in the desert. Yes, the fire brings pain and stress to the environment and the people who care for it, but in the end it allows for new life to grow and flourish.

Having lived in both metaphorical and real deserts, that Jesus would face the devil in the desert makes sense to me. In the desert there is only you and the spirit, nothing else seems to matter. Entering the desert can be terrifying; the threat of heat that is unbearable can be too much at times. But this heat, this fire can provide a cleansing, a healing that no other experience can match. Whether Jesus feels these same fears, I do not know. I go to the desert with ashes from fires that life throws my way, I sit with the ashes, I grow in the ashes. I leave with the strength of new life.