Wilderness: Walking through Grief

John 14:1-3

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

I don’t know if I’m here tonight because of a wilderness or because I’m bewildered. And maybe it doesn’t matter. O those wildernesses. Scripture says Elijah RAN to his, and even Jesus was LED to one. I was DROPPED into my wilderness last year, first when Susan died, and then deeper into it just a month later when Mary died. Susan and Mary didn’t know each other, but it looked like they planned their exit strategy together. I had texted Susan multiple times without a reply. My last text cheerfully said, “Susan, are you there?” She no longer was. Mary and I were arranging lunch for a Tuesday, but on Sunday Mary died in her kitchen. Without warning, they just disappeared. I was and still am bewildered.

Of the many synonyms for “wilderness,” I chose the word “empty.” The deep, decades-long, trusted friendships I had with these women each ended so abruptly, they left me lost in an emptiness, of grief. I love them still and will always be homesick for them, even as my grief changes, because being in their lives was anything BUT empty.

Susan was warmth and lofty ideals, gentleness, calm, and refinement. Living in a tiny traditional home with her tapestries, carvings, music, books, and friends filled with life, it’s no wonder I thrived on her laughter and her bright conversations, about faith and justice, about love and deep soul-searching, about the heart stuff and hard stuff of life. Ever caring, she Facetimed her grandchildren when they came home after school to their empty house, faithfully grandparenting from 200 miles away. I especially loved that she watched Cross of Grace services on YouTube so often that she even knew some of you who served by name. She loved people tenderly, including me…and you.

Mary, on the other hand, was everything earthy and creative, funny, colorful, and outrageous! Her small double-wide home in the country overflowed with rescued dogs, cats, and grown kids. I cherish the way she usually started our conversations with an abrupt, “Hey, DK, I have an idea.” And she always did. Her friends still talk about the time she was in the bar where her son was a bouncer, and a wild brawl broke out. Mary suddenly rushed into the middle of it, (and Mary was not one to rush anywhere,) and began pushing drunk guys out of the way to get to her son, all the while shouting to him, “Are you ok?!? Are you OK?!?” She never once considered that her son was a Green Beret in the military and probably didn’t really need her help. Mary loved fiercely. She would have rescued just me the same.

Maybe you can see my empty holes no one will ever fill the same way. I tell you all this tonight, not about grief especially, but wondering if maybe you have been bewildered and lost in a wilderness too. If not in one of grief, then maybe in a loss of another relationship, or one lacking, of health, a job, a loss of a home, a dream, of time passing, a loss of purpose, or the road not taken. Maybe it’s a longing for an undefined something missing. If you don’t have a story to tell yet, you probably will. Together in this world, it’s hard to have a life without a wilderness, eventually.

My wilderness felt like this picture behind me. * Our baptismal fount at CoG, is usually filled with fresh, life-restoring, touchable water, but looked like this last Lent. Could it have been any drier, or less nourishing, or less life-filled? I mean, Jesus was there, in the middle of my wilderness, just like the cross is in the photo. No one had to say to me, “Have hope in the resurrection.” That wouldn’t help. I knew that. I never doubted it in my head ever, but I was achingly sad anyway. I noticed more of the cold, hard stones, than the warmth of grace and love I knew was there. I was empty. I felt like Elijah in the lesson, looking for God in multiple places, certain God would show up, but not quite finding Him like I hoped. A wilderness can be a lonely place. Can anyone ever really know exactly what you are missing? Really?

The coldest time in my wilderness was during Advent, hearing a Wednesday message about how a different Mary, pregnant mother of Jesus, went to her wonderful, wise Aunt Elizabeth for support and love. Imagining that relationship, my tears ran. I hurt. I needed my go-to Aunt Elizabeths for ideas and creativity, for memories made together, and the joy of long-time belonging. I would have cried with Mary about Susan, and with Susan about Mary, but I could do neither. I needed my Aunt Elizabeths. Do you know what that longing is like, no matter your wilderness?

All that made the late Christmas Eve service sermon especially touching, reaching deep within my being, and settling there. That night, the reason for Christmas all sounded different. Compassion as I saw it on the video that night looked different. Things changed.

• I understood why Jesus actually WANTED to live in the same kind of vulnerable human mess I was In…..so that He could recognize and be the compassion I needed. He could say, “Dianne, I’ve been there too. Really.”

• I understood that Jesus experienced courage, in order to give ME courage…. so I could be courageously compassionate to others. He could say, “Go ahead and try it, Dianne. I’ve done that too. Really.”

• I understood how Jesus came to love people through all their wildernesses… so we could love a person through a wilderness too. He could say, “Yep. I’ve shown you how. And still do. Really.”

Jesus was replacing this cold stone * cross with His warm Presence again. I surely don’t know how it was happening, but it was. Really. I knew Jesus lived with MY particular grief, MY experiences with MY special friends, MY emptiness too. My very real compassionate Jesus knew what I was missing and was sad right along with me the whole time. He could say, “Dianne, I get it. Really.” and totally mean it. Mary and Susan left, but Jesus never did. I didn’t know it while in my wilderness, but I was being cared for.

I wonder, when Elijah ran fear of his life, did he realize how he was also being cared for? Or did he see it in HINDSIGHT? He was given courage, direction, and support while he was trying to find home again. He found Grace in his wilderness. In HINDSIGHT, I know Grace was always there for me too. Like our Lenten song has said repeatedly, more or less, ´Elijah and I may have had to wait, may have had to pray more than we usually do.” No voice or manna or burning bushes came to me in my wilderness. I wish. But there WERE words, emails, hugs, and conversations. Earthly ones. There was Grace when I realized, in HINDSIGHT, that in my Stephen Minister training, I had already heard about, read about, and practiced grief situations and had been given the privilege to walk it with others BEFORE I was dropped into my own. Jesus led me gently into my grief and I didn’t even know it. There were lovely souls around who were sad with me, and said so. People gave me God’s Word and their words. People sang song lyrics, even sad ones, and served me bread and wine, and did some serious listening that I’m sure Jesus overheard. Some people were put in my path, or on YouTube, authors and teachers, friends and strangers alike.

In HINDSIGHT I think Jesus knew I had to walk differently with Him for a while, before I could see His invitation to take His hand again. And so He gave me PEOPLE. I was tended to, held up, and provided for in my wilderness, by the warm love of Jesus, through people. It took time, and listening. ”I may have had to wait. I may have had to pray more that I usually do.” When I thought the happy Jesus of Christmas and Easter sometimes looked pretty puny in my wilderness, I was sustained and tended to anyway. Really. How cool is it that our God loved me enough to provide, and provide and provide, even when I wasn’t ready to see it.

Exodus 15: 13 says about our Lord, “In your unfailing love, you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength, you will guide them to Your Holy Dwelling.” I believe that. And more.

In His unfailing love, I believe God leads and guides us to emerge differently from our wildernesses, no matter our wilderness, no matter how long it takes.

I believe God’s love and strength provided Jesus with the vulnerability, courage, and compassion He needed just to get through His own life, death and resurrection. And He emerged differently, for us.

I believe Jesus left all that behind in each of us. Vulnerability, courage and compassion, is in, us. I am reminded about that often at Cog, even this Lent.

I believe we need that vulnerability, courage, and compassion to walk with each other in the wilderness, as we are called to do.

I don’t believe it looks the same for everyone or happens in the same timeframe. In fact, sometimes I wonder if maybe we are ALL in a wilderness ALL the time and maybe don’t see it; all the time maybe searching for a way to fully live as God intends. Maybe we are ALL still aching for some holes in our lives to be filled…mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual. While in Our own daily wilderness, we are called to walk with others, as much as we are able, anyway.

I believe God has called me to walk with others through their wildernesses and I’ve missed the opportunities.

I believe we each are to look for them, and when we find them…. I believe we are called to love through those hard times, love through it all, through messy empty places. Just keep loving.

Because I believe that when one of us walks another through a wilderness, every single time that happens, we are ALL, ALL of us, a step closer to being, led, home…… through the love of God and Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Wilderness: Addiction and Burning Bushes

Luke 13:6-9

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

---

Hello, my name is Chris. My family and I are fairly new here. We attend second service and are just beginning to get involved. My wife, Mary, and I have been married for over 16 years. We have two amazing daughters, Elliott and Harper, and two spoiled dogs.

When the weather warms up, we can normally be found outside. We fill our weekends camping and enjoying nature. Woods and fields; oceans and mountains; waterfalls and caves; these are the things that fill my cup. These are my sacred and holy places, the places I most often encounter God.

To find places to explore and then make my way through them, I need a map. I need directions or a guide, otherwise I get lost. I have a pretty decent sense of direction on the trail or in the woods. But sometimes I get lost. Sometimes I get really lost.

A few years ago, my family and I were camping in North Carolina over fall break. It was my wife’s birthday and we decided to celebrate by hiking up a mountain to this—supposedly—beautiful waterfall. Except we kept climbing, switchback after switchback and, as the day got hotter and hotter, we could not find the turn off for the waterfall. We kept saying “just a little farther” to two very grumpy kids and then we’d get “just a little farther” and see nothing. We didn’t bring water or snacks or a map or anything you should take on a 3-hour hike on a hot day because we didn’t know it would take this long. Eventually, my family, on the brink of despair and starvation, turned around having never found this waterfall. If you think they have let me live that down, or not mentioned it every time we go on a hike even years later, you would be gravely mistaken.

A lot of the lessons I’ve learned in nature help me when I return to my everyday life. Getting lost can feel helpless and out of control. It can be scary. It can feel lonely.

I felt those things for years. For a long time, I felt out of control and alone.

I didn’t want to be an alcoholic, but I was. I had become one.

I didn’t want my dependence on alcohol to separate me from my wife and kids, but it did. And even in the middle of so much loss and hurt, I could not stop drinking. I was not done hurting myself or others, even though I desperately wanted to be.

I know God loved me in my addiction. God continued to love unconditionally even as I continued to hurt myself and those around me. But I also know God wanted better for me. God wanted me to feel less shame, less loneliness, less scared. God wanted to help me out of the wilderness I’d found myself in. But I didn’t know how to find the map. I had lost my sense of direction. I felt lost.

When you’re lost in the wilderness of it, it's easy to forget that addiction, of any kind, impacts other people and not just the addict. We can convince ourselves that “one more time” won’t hurt anyone. But that’s not the truth. Our decisions always have a ripple effect. We don’t drop a single stone into a pond without hundreds of ripples. It’s the same with addiction; we are not islands, our choices impact others.

In the summer of 2017, I was in a pit of despair. I could not control my drinking and the effect that had on my wife and on my children was hard to avoid. The tears. The anger. The sadness. The confusion. I wasn’t living in our home anymore; I had monitored visits with my kids. I had to prove I was sober and safe before I was allowed to be near them. I was sleeping on other peoples’ couches and guest beds. I was untethered. It was, in the truest sense, a wilderness.

I went to AA. I went to Celebrate Recovery. I spoke with drug counselors and therapists. And all I wanted to do was drink. Drinking was what made everything feel better. It helped me to forget the past. It helped me to forget the present. I was able to drown the world in alcohol. But now it was the drinking I could not forget; I had grown physically dependent on alcohol. I could no longer function without it. I couldn’t get out of bed without a drink.

I said foxhole prayers. “Oh God, get me out of this. Help me feel better. I’ll do anything! God, please!”

Alcohol ruled my life. It made all my decisions for me. Where I went. What I did. Who I spent my time with. In the end, it had secluded me, isolated me, separated me from the people I loved. My wife was at home wondering how long it would be until she had to tell my girls I was dead. I was in the wilderness, and so was my family.

You might be lucky enough to not have had to deal with addiction. But I can guess, you’ve experienced loneliness, fear, and anxiety. We all, at times, feel unlovable, lost, or helpless.

I felt those things and blamed God for all of them. I was in the wilderness of my own making and begged for a map, for a way out. If God would just give me a map, this would all be over. I was sure of it.

In September 2017, I woke up in a hospital. My wife had made the hard decision to call the police as I was driving drunk the night before. I vaguely remembered a police officer telling me I could take a ride to a detox facility or get into the car with my very angry wife. I chose the hospital. It was the less scary choice.

But it was still scary, waking up in a hospital gown in an unfamiliar room. I knew this was it. Nothing else had worked, and this was the end for me. This was not the end I had envisioned. It felt like God had left me; I had not been rescued from myself. I did not plan to live much longer and now I was naked except for a very airy hospital gown in a locked medical facility. As I walked to breakfast surrounded by people in real clothes, I knew this was it. I had reached my bottom. I was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually broken. I had no job. No home. No family. My wife was talking with a lawyer to end our marriage. I had nothing left.

I spent a week in the medical facility detoxing. I wanted that to be the end of it, but my wife said no, you can’t come home. My friends said no, you can’t come back. I was out of options. I checked myself into a residential rehab facility. You have a lot of free time in rehab but no access to your normal vices. I did what I was told to do because what else was there to do? I was a whole other kind of wilderness.

Sometimes the map out of the wilderness is other people and routine. It’s trusting those ahead of you on the journey. I didn’t feel like this was the way out of the wilderness, but I didn’t have any other ideas or options, either.

In Exodus, Moses encounters a burning bush. I’ve heard the story of this strange event my whole life. This burning bush phenomenon has always fascinated me. God speaking to Moses from a fire in a bush. Holy ground. I can’t help but imagine Moses being at his rock bottom during this time. Here was a prince of Egypt wandering the wilderness tending his father-in-law’s flock. He was running for his life, in hiding because he’d just killed a man. He didn’t even have his own sheep. And now he was talking to a bush?

I could relate to Moses. I had hit my own kind of rock bottom, and I liked the biblical company.

A few weeks into my rehab stay, I began to walk around the grounds. Behind the house was a small-wooded area. On this day, I had just learned that my insurance company was ending my treatment and wanted to discharge me. I was scared. It was the longest I had been sober in years. I wasn’t ready. I still needed constant supervision. I still had so much work to do. While wandering around the woods, I came upon a downed tree. The tree was covered in a bright orange-red fungus. It consumed the tree, giving it the appearance of being on fire.

It felt like my own burning bush. I could feel God—in the midst of all my worries and hurts and fears—say, “I will be with you.” Just like God did for Moses. The ground I was standing on felt holy.

I had been pleading, begging, and calling out to God for years asking to take this addiction away from me. I didn’t want to be an alcoholic like my dad. I had seen the destruction it had caused. Addiction ruins marriages and families and lives. It steals so much. In this moment, when I had finally gotten quiet enough to listen, God reminded me that He was with me. God had never left me, but I had forgotten what it felt like to not be alone. And I wasn’t alone. God was with me.

Things did not get magically better. But God used people to help guide me out of the wilderness I had ended up in. Sober people who knew how it felt to be so lost. Counselors who helped me address the reasons I drank. Guides showed up along the path and led me when I was too tired and scared to do it alone. I did in-patient programs, out-patient programs, AA meetings, and lived in a halfway house with supervision. I stopped hiding, I showed up, I was held accountable. I was given directions and I followed them even if it was painful. (And it was painful; recovery is hard and painful.) But it was worth it.

I had been in the wilderness alone for so long that I forgot how much I needed other people. I forgot that hiding and shame alienated; that the map I was begging God for was always going to be other people and honesty. I was demanding something God had already provided, but I wasn’t ready to show up for or receive it yet.

Isaiah 41:10 says, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” God is with us, always. And when we don’t feel it or believe it or see it, there are people who come alongside us and reflect God’s love, mercy, grace, and peace for Him. For me, those people were my wife, my girls, my fellow addicts and alcoholics, the friends and family who showed up again when I was ready to show up again, too.

Like I said before, your wilderness might not be addiction. Your wilderness might look different than mine, but the feelings are often the same: loneliness, fear, shame, or anxiety. We feel lost and out of control and forgotten. We feel unloved and sad. Often the answer God is giving us, when we care to look around, is the people who surround us. People are the map to higher ground. People are the support when we feel tired. People are the guides that reflect God back to us. We just have to be willing to pay attention. I’m glad that I finally did and grateful for the chance to try again each day.

Amen