Years ago, when my family lived in that place we still lovingly refer to as “the far East,” I would occasionally make the one-hour trip north to Chesapeake, VA, to buy bulk portions of food and family necessities. My older boys were still pretty small when I asked them to help offload our purchases. One day I gave my oldest a particularly heavy flat of canned vegetables. When I placed it in his hands, he looked at me with distress. His eyes told me, “This is too heavy.” My eyes told him, “You need to give it a try.”
He lumbered a few steps, grunted, and set the package down. He began to push it along the brick walk, then walked to the front and pulled it a few more paces. Things were going slowly but well, until he reached the stairs. I could see the wheels turning in his mind as he calculated the challenge. He tipped it up, pulled, grunted, and strained. After a little while, I joined him and placed the flat back in his hands. He smiled briefly, but then — feeling the full weight — grunted his dismay that he would not make it up the stairs. Instead of relieving his burden, I picked him up and carried him with the load into the kitchen. We laughed as he set it down. He made it… with a little help.
We have an uneasy relationship to our dependence, and I believe it makes our relationship to God awfully complicated. We remember in Scripture how Jesus begins his ministry with forty days in the wilderness — a time he could not hide his dependence upon God. He would not face his test alone, and shows us the sort of relationship that celebrates the ways God goes to work in us when we risk being vulnerable before God.
On February 22, the church will enter the season of Lent, a traditional time of preparation for Easter. In Lent, Christians are invited to take an inventory of our lives and to consider how God might want to continue working your life into what you were made to be all along.
As we reckon with our dependence in our own wilderness, the good news comes in the words of Deuteronomy — words uttered in the wilderness — echoed in Hebrews 13, words from God’s own heart: “I will never leave you. I will never forsake you.”
Sometimes we need to hear “I’ve got you!” and sometimes we need to hear “You can make it!” Though distinctly different experiences, they are part of the same story — the story of a God whose love is so great, so strong, that nothing in all of creation can separate us from it.
Grace and Peace,