Mouth Wide Open

"You, God, are my God,
    earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
   my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
    where there is no water."
Psalm 63:1

Dear Friends,

I grew up in a Christian home with faithful and good Christian parents. Church was Sunday morning, evening, Wednesday evening, and other days in-between for various events. I was homeschooled and with our hands over our hearts we pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word, to the Christian flag and to the Savior whose kingdom it stands, every morning. We never missed a Sunday for sports or sleepovers or vacation, attending other churches when not in town. Around high school, my theological questions deepened and skepticism found a warm spot in my heart, but still was just as involved in the church, attending a Christian high school and later a Christian university. 

I’ve long felt I’ve been swimming in a deep pool of water, never parched, rarely longing, mouth wide open and filled to the brim so much so that I don’t even notice. The vastness of Living Water around me has become common, expected, rote where the routine of church as it’s been has developed a complacency and comfort—a kind of Christian laziness—in me. 

The wilderness is a disruptive place, physical or metaphorical, that leaves us unbalanced and wobbly. The wilderness can be something we choose to step into (Lent, pilgrimage, retreat) and sometimes the wilderness is something that happens to us (COVID-19, death, loss). I wonder if the global pandemic wilderness that began in this third week of Lent last year could be a kind of disruption I’ve needed? 

Lent is abrasive discomfort if we allow it to be. 

I took my family to Disneyland a few years ago. My son was very excited to be in the driver’s seat for Autopia, feet barely touching the gas pedal. As he navigated the steering wheel, leaning into each corner, he felt the car bump against the track and in that moment he realized he wasn’t actually driving. He felt duped because he knew there was more than being confined to a track. 

Lent reveals there’s more. It shows me my ruts, my laziness, that there’s so much more than the theology and churchology I’ve been handed and perpetuated. This Lenten wilderness is the kind of disruption my soul longs for because it’s there in the wilderness when I cry and shout into the deepest voids and darkest nights, sometimes nothing comes back to me. In the wilderness, deep cries out to deep. In the wilderness, voids go farther than my eye can see and the silence is deafening.

In the wilderness, I am parched, I am dry and thirsty and desperate. 

In this Lenten wilderness, my ruts no longer determine the direction I lazily go, simply following the track I’ve long felt confined to. Instead everything gets disrupted as I begin to see Christ as the Living Water that satisfies and even Living Water can’t be confined to some track. I begin to see Jesus in the wilderness, in those desperate spaces of loss and lack. I begin to see Jesus outside the constructs I grew up with and maybe I’m being lead with you, my friend, into unknown, desolate spaces where we can long, seek, and thirst once again. 

I wonder if we’ll leave this wilderness with a new theology and churchology more robust, gritty, and life-giving than before we arrived? And maybe we can live out that gritty new theology and churchology together.

With (love),
Bethany