Saturday

A friend told me the other day that living a life of faith is like walking across a windy plain. It is neither comfortable nor certain, but it is possible. While the tendency might be to hunker down and stop moving altogether, once you stand up and walk, you realize that the wind pushes but does not push you down. I am struck by this image because the only power one has over the situation is to keep walking because the wind will not be tamed. I can’t control the wind and have no certainty of destination or that the wind will stop, but to walk in faith is to keep walking.

Today I realized that Lent has been a time for me to prove my piety by being in control, by being disciplined, but I think this is a terrible misunderstanding of the tradition on my part. The desert is a place of humility that is precious because it creates a space for us to be stripped of our comforts and our vices. It puts us in a place where are dependence is placed on God, that we would be able to see his provision.

For this season of Lent I want to learn to sit in a place where my dependence is placed on God and not on my own strength because how will I know that I can walk across the windy plain until I get up? What keeps me from experiencing God as my provider and in what ways have I truncated his power in my life?

Friday: My Desert (With a view of the Space Needle)

Just over a week ago, before I knew anything about this lent blog, I sent an email to my mom saying that my recent move to Seattle seemed to me to be the right thing, though as much as I love this city, I likened my time here to Jesus’ 40 days in the desert. Ironically, the first theme of our lent blog is “the desert.”
For many people, the desert is a hot, dry, god-forsaken, ugly bit of Earth. For me, at the moment, the desert is full of beauty. Every day I see snow-capped mountains on either side of me. Within minutes I can be on the beach, hearing waves lap upon the shore as seals bark just off the docks. (Coming from South Dakota, these are exciting sounds.) And while I am encompassed by beauty, both in nature and in the individuals by which I find myself surrounded, these last two weeks have been among the driest and harshest of my life.
I find it interesting that in the Scripture for this week, it was the Spirit that led Jesus into the desert, as that's kind of how it seemed I've ended up in Seattle. Jesus had just come from being baptized and hearing his father’s voice to suddenly being completely isolated. I do not mean to imply that I feel isolated since my move to Seattle, but rather challenged. I have been challenged to give up everything to Christ, like I never have been before. To die to myself. To wander in the wilderness after a time of plenty, as my time in Sioux Falls truly was. But while in the desert, there is nothing one seeks more than water. And while I wander in the desert, I will not go thirsty for Jesus is the living water. He is a much-welcomed oasis.
As we journey with Jesus during this Lenten season, we begin where He began: the desert. Yet dry as it may be, he is to be our refuge. He, too, has wandered in the desert and knows what it’s like to be hot, tired, hungry, and tempted. He has understood the need for refreshment. This is what he longs to be for me. Maybe eventually I will realize that is truly only in Him I will find a quenching of my thirst.

Thursday: I'm thinking about old guys. And about taking them for Lent.

Thoughts on old guys:

I've never seen an old guy get hassled by airport security.
I feel like security just waves them by.

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Thoughts on thoughts:

Sometimes, I feel like my negative thoughts are like the old guys at the airport, and my mind is the security guard who waves them by, unchecked.

For Lent, I want to be more thoughtful about my thoughts. I want to start patting down the old guys who slip through, unchecked. I want to halt them at the gate. I want to make them drop their bags and strip down to their socks. And I want to stare them down and interrogate them. "Excuse me, sir, where did you come from? And just where do you think you are going?" "What else is in your golf bag, Arnold Palmer?


Some questions I have this Lent:

1. What sorts of thoughts do I let slip by, unchecked?
--Who are the old guys in my airport?

2. What do these thoughts mean?
--What's in their bags?

3. Where do these thoughts come from?
--Whose bags are these, How did I get them?

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.

Lent 1 - In the Desert

Here's a link to Luke 4:1-13, this week's Gospel text:

http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/CLent/cLent1.htm

I remember the first time I traveled through New Mexico. I had fallen asleep in my family's Toyota Previa, a frothy-white van with barely the hint of a front end. I awoke to the heat of the desert, my shirt suctioned gently to the top of my damp skin.

My father would refuse to turn on the air conditioning except in the most extreme of circumstances. He was of the mind that air conditioning wasted gas, or put us out of touch with our environment, or showed weakness. So, for the next two or three hours, as our vehicle pushed west-east through the heart of New Mexico's desert, I suffered in quiet surrender to the power of heat and desperation.

At long last, we pulled up to our hotel and moved our overstuffed suitcases into our rooms. I stepped outside and went to the middle of the parking lot, surrounded by ten or twelve differing license plates. I remember that I felt dry, my body's water supply given over to sweat during the day. And I thought to myself:

"This place is dead. Dirty roads, ugly brown weeds, life-draining sun. How could anyone ever find peace here?"


This week we're journeying with Christ into the desert, into a place of wandering and reflection. We're asked to take stock of our lives, to look at where we're at. We have quiet in the desert, and time. But how can we not feel lonely and barren? The question I asked in a warm parking lot in New Mexico could be asked of this Gospel text. How can we find ourselves in the desert?

Welcome to 40

Welcome to 40, a 2007 Lenten blog for Church of the Apostles.

In Epiphany we walked with Christ while he was among us on the earth, joining with him in establishing his kingdom. Now we retreat with Jesus into the wilderness to reflect.

Throughout Lent we'll be asking the question: "where are we at?" Answering this question will hopefully give us insight into ourselves and into our common life together.

One way of engaging with this question is through story. COTA is an eclectic community full of different-ness, people with all sorts of stories to tell. 40 will be blogged by the people of COTA, and there will be something new all 40 days of the season of Lent. Check back daily for words from someone in our community.

Read these stories, these meditations, these ideas, and use them to find "where you are at" in God's community this Lent.