Embracing the Desert: The Gifts of Unemployment
The promise of the desert for us
The fear the desert brings to us is what makes the privileged role of the biblical desert so confounding. We only want the desert to end. We pray God will take it away, and we get angry and impatient when a vast stretch of vulnerability is all we see before us. And yet it is precisely this vulnerability that gives God room to act.
Despite the real danger of the biblical desert, it is there that God often acts most powerfully. Although the Israelites longed for the security of their slavery and for the vegetables that filled their stomachs in Egypt, it was in the desert that God provided manna and quail for them to eat. The Israelites might have longed for the comfort foods of certainty, but only in their vulnerability could they witness God’s miraculous care for them. Had Elijah not been forced to flee into the desert (where he asked God to take his life), he never would have known God’s willingness to provide for his needs. If not for a courageous journey through the desert, Elijah might never have had the privilege of recognizing God’s voice in the faintest of whispers. Surely Jesus’ time in the desert, where he was so vulnerable to temptation, strengthened his courage to continue his mission to its ultimate end.
While the Scriptures offer us the image of the desert as a privileged place to encounter God, it is important to note that God doesn’t “cause” us to lose our jobs, nor does God withhold work from us until we “learn something.” Instead God, too, has chosen vulnerability. In giving us free will, God is vulnerable to our choices. The accomplishment of God’s will is thwarted at times by the sinfulness and selfishness of people just like us. But within those selfish and sinful situations, God still dwells. God did not create us for the desert (there is no desert of Eden!), but neither does God abandon us there.