Archives: October 2009

Wandering
in the wilderness...

By Mike Pilavachi

There’s a famous story in the Bible that Jesus told. It concerns a rich master who, just before a lengthy trip away, calls three of his servants together and hands them different amount of cash. He tells each of them to get on with the business of making more cash out of what’s in their hands, and goes away. When he returns he calls each of them in and asks to see what they’ve done with his wad.

It turns out that the two who had been given the larger sums had managed to double their purses. The master is happy, but the smile goes when the third servant arrives and tells him that because he thought the master was such a hard man, he stuck the cash in a hole in the ground and had managed to increase its value by absolutely nothing at all.

This story – you can read it for yourself in Matthew 25 – is normally used to illustrate the fact that we all have talents from God that we ought to be using for him. I happen to think that it also can take a slightly different spin: the need for perseverance. Think about the servant – the one who made no profit and did nothing while his master was away. He buried the coin and, presumably, forgot all about it.

The clever servants, however, had a different story to tell. Instead of forgetting about things, they carried on, working hard at increasing their return, despite the fact that their master was nowhere to be found. He was unavailable for either advice or reassurance. There must have been times when it looked as though they were about to lose everything – such is the nature of money – and at those times I am sure that they would have been tempted to give up on the whole idea. Instead, though, they carried on, receiving their master’s pleasure when he returned.

This is how it should be with us. When God seems far away we too have a choice: either we bury our faith and forget about the Master, or we continue in his absence, carrying out the orders that he has given us until we feel close to him again.

But, you may just be about to ask, how can we be sure that we will feel close to him again? In the dark night of the soul, daylight seems a long way off, and nothing can seem certain. Well, it’s not just Christians today who have been through it, but believers and followers of God throughout history. The Bible is generously seasoned with stories of people who feel as though God is playing an elaborate game of hide and seek with them. In a sense he is, he takes away his presence, his nearness from them and asks them a simple question: will you search for me?

This is exactly what happened to Moses. Having left the comfort of the palace he found himself in the wilderness for quite some time before his run in with God in the shape of the burning bush. The same thing happened to the rest of his countrymen a few years later as they spent forty years wandering around the desert trying to find the promised land. This was not necessarily due to the fact that the promised land was a particularly long way away, but more due to their desperate need to rediscover their relationship with God before they rebuilt their society.

These stories are not confined to the Old Testament either, as Jesus’ coming changed little about this natural rhythm of relationship with God Almighty. We know that John the Baptist did his proclaiming about Jesus from the literal desert, and that Jesus too spent forty days on his own in the wilderness.