The only way out is up

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1).

From spiritual ecstasy to spiritual wilderness. The wilderness theme is a universal experience in every life, because most of us find that we spend much more time in the wilderness of life than we do in the Promised Land.

A happy marriage is a promised land of sorts, but most find a fine line between paradise and wilderness. Rewarding work seems promising, but even our life’s calling can become a barren, day-in-day-out wilderness at times.

Even leisure can become a wilderness. It was so for the writer of Ecclesiastes who tried comforts, excess, riches, feasts, wines and lavish parties; but, in the end, he could only speak of meaninglessness where, in the words of Shelley, “boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One of my favorite preachers/ authors is Max Lucado. He writes in his study Bible: “The trip from Egypt to the Promised Land can be made in less than 11 days. It took the Israelites 40 years. What they should have done, they didn’t. And what they didn’t do, they should have. So God decided they needed some time to rethink a few things. He took them the long way. Maybe you’re on a detour in your journey. Things seem slow. The road seems dark. Maybe God is wanting to teach you a few things. Pay attention! You don’t want to spend 40 years missing the point.”

One hundred miles out from Fort Worth is a scrubby, bleak lot. On it sits a simple mobile home in sparse surroundings to which some young husband brought his new wife. Bleak prairies, desolate, lonely . . . a wilderness. Yet above the driveway that enters the lot, the owner has put a sign that names the place: “Cloud Nine.” There in the middle of a wilderness was paradise. And it can be so, here, in the middle of Texas—heaven and a holy land.

The Flight of the Phoenix is a 1964 novel by Elleston Trevor, made into a 1965 movie with Jimmy Stewart, and remade in 2004. A plane carrying ten people crashlands in the Gobi Desert. The survivors can’t walk out: the sand dunes alter so quickly that maps are useless. Compasses “dance” because of magnetic iron in the mountains; and your strongest leg will cause you to walk in miles-wide circles without you realizing it. The survivors must build a plane from the scrap of the first plane and fly out.

I’m sure the tag-line of the film was not intended to have a spiritual meaning, but to me it has: “The only way out is up.”

Do not fear the wilderness of Life. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The God who leads in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night is your God. The God who rains down bread from heaven is your God. The God who gives water, even from solid rock, is your God. The God who opens the way to the Promised Land is your God. The God of Israel is a god of the wilderness. If you want to know him, then you must go to the wilderness. But it is in going to the wilderness that you will find the Holy Land. The only way out is up.