Difficult People
Last week we saw that physical desert, with its appearance of unlimited godforsaken emptiness, is a symbol of the human experience of the absence of God in our life, and the feeling of being abandoned by God and left to our own resources. In the spiritual life, a desert experience is the feeling of inner emptiness that comes from feeling cut off from the divine presence that is our deepest satisfaction and fulfillment.
We are in a spiritual desert when we feel God's absence, when we believe that God has abandoned us. The world can seem like a spiritual wilderness to us because we experience God as unavailable.
Where we are going is not as important as who we are becoming along the way. God is more concerned about developing our character because God is raising us, the children of God, to spend eternity with God. Possessing a land flowing with milk and honey is not as important as having a heart flowing with love, peace, justice, courage, and faith. God allows us to go through these difficult spiritual wilderness experiences in our lives to grow us, to mature us, to strengthen us, and to draw us closer to God. The wilderness is where the deep internal work of God is forged upon our souls. It is a time of facing our doubts and our fears and it is a time of settling one's own deepest identity, calling, and relationship with God. When we find ourselves in one of these spiritual wilderness experiences we should not be asking, "How do I get out of here?" but instead we should be asking, "What am I supposed to be learning from this?"
The spiritual wilderness forces a question upon us, and our answer should always be the same as our Lord Jesus. Our answer should always be that we will not isolate ourselves away from God, but that we will always, always turn to God, and rely upon God, irrespective of our circumstances as God grows us and matures us and leads us safely through the wilderness and safely back to our eternal home with the Lord.
This coming Sunday we will continue in Luke chapter 4 where the people of Nazareth spoke well of Jesus and marveled at his gracious words one minute and the next minute were filled with wrath and attempted to throw Jesus off a cliff. These were indeed some difficult people in Jesus' life and we will look at what we are expected to do with the difficult people we encounter in our own lives.