A Spiritual Detox…

The voice of one who calls out, “Prepare the way of the LORD in the wilderness! Make a level highway in the desert for our God.” (Isaiah 40:3)

This verse from the prophet Isaiah is read at the beginning of the Advent season, the weeks prior to the feast of Christmas.  It is quoted in Matthew’s Gospel referring to John the Baptist preparing for the coming of Jesus’s ministry.  It announces a period of preparation for great things to come.  John’s message was simple: Repent!  Change direction, go the opposite way, get yourself ready for an arrival of a special Visitor who will change your life entirely.

The desert is the place meant to purge us of all that is spiritually unhealthy in us: our pride and our selfishness, the desire for control, dependence upon unhealthy relationships, the loosening of our fierce grip on material things.  Our Father God, the Great and Wise Physician, knows the medicine we truly need in order to be holy and ready for Heaven.

And so, akin to a physical cleanse, he draws us into a desert place where our usual resources are absent.  This is where we can grow up in him, where we might learn that he alone is the One we need to lean upon for our life.  Understandably, we resist this mightily, for we recoil from such desert places where things are bleak.  It can be a very lonely and painful place to be.  

We might ask: how can this desert place of physical or emotional suffering, of  loneliness, helplessness, frustration or grief come from God’s love?  When we cry out in prayer and it seems that no help arrives, when circumstances remain unchanged for weeks, months, even years – that’s a desert experience.  Yet the Scriptures insist that all circumstances of our life are meant for our good (Romans 8:28-29).

For the LORD has comforted Zion; he has comforted all her waste places, and has made her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody. (Isaiah 51:3).

Only our God could use every terrible situation for our eternal good.  He has demonstrated this ability in how he transformed the gruesome death of Jesus Christ on Calvary’s hill into the greatest blessing the world has ever known.  What could be worse than that the God of Love came to mankind and we killed him?  Yet Jesus freely gave his life as a ransom for us, to free us from our enslavement to sin and self and to the Evil One.  He has allowed us to be adopted into his family and even to become sharers in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), his very Body. 

How can we doubt then that he can use all things, every experience of the desert we may find ourselves in, for our ultimate good?  Jesus knows the desert; he has been there himself, and he has promised always to be with us and never to leave us alone in it.  What can separate us from his love? asks St Paul (Romans 8:35-39).  His answer is clear: For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

Lord, grant us a greater measure of persevering faith in you, of trust in your sovereign goodness and love!  Fortify our hope as we lovingly cling to you. And open the eyes of our hearts to see your provision for us in the desert, those hidden springs of water that can sustain us until the desert blooms again.