Living In the Void

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      The winners of the Olympic contests may be revealed after a quick and jagged ski run down a mountain, after a long and stylish jump off of a long ramp, or after a two-minute figure skating performance in an ice rink, but the fact remains clear that the contests are won in those long and grueling hours of physical workouts and mental periods of quiet preparation. The ecstasy of stepping up onto the "medals platform" for the winners is only the culmination and the end result of all the time and distance between the beginning place and the end result. All participants in the great sports of life know that preparations for a competitive life are a long period of dry wilderness with much purposeful time of training spent between the beginning place and the ending place.
      The hardest rock and the densest matter of the universe are in essence similar to the sparse distancing of the planets in the outer space of our universe. After all, we call it “space,” not “clutter”. We might imagine that the sub-atomic particles of a piece of lead would be dense and close together when, in reality, this is actually filled with space and distance more than substance. We would imagine that a sub-atomic visit to the make-up of the hardest piece of obsidian would reveal a massive and dense core when, in reality, the real substance of this stone is particles distant and remote held together in space by a weak form of gravity. We imagine our life to be so dense, but in reality we actually exist in a state of being that is more with space than with substance.
      We modern and prosperous people find it hard to imagine life without dense and abundant plenty. Our days are filled with excitement provided for us by local media that taps into human interest and cataclysmic stories from round the world. We have no lack of excitement at our fingertips in our day-to-day lives. And when media cannot provide real accounts of drama, then the sitcoms and “reality” TV fill in the void. We moderns do not like having distance and space between our emotional, excitable, and entertaining moments. We like noise, activity, sports conquests, unbelievable stories revealed in real time slathered onto our lives, so that we cannot know and hear the distant call to quiet and peace.
      Even our diet, shopping habits, desire for stuff, addiction to euphoria, and symptomatic repulsion to down-time all point to this falsely expectant fantasy, our poverty and death of realization of what makes up a proper life. We have to be entertained, filled, and immersed in excitement every moment of our spacious lives, or we feel left out and depressed.
      Moses wandered around for years behind the little animals before he turned and witnessed a burning bush that was not consumed. Our scripture writers give little space to the wilderness experience but give great attention and climactic energy at the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land. Forty years of wandering around in the wilderness by a massive tribe of faithful people is just as long as forty years of searching would be today. Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days, a painful heaviness of time where he is tempted, only to have the events of this grueling time in temptation summed up in one verse in the Gospels. Real life in the Lord is filled with lots of preparation, huge amounts of space, and great volumes of emotionally void time when absolutely nothing of excitement and notable mention takes place and where clear sight of the next moment of ecstasy is so distant that we are unable to see our next rendezvous.
      We are created for times of quiet, spaces of distant wilderness journeying, casual periods when nothing notable occurs, and life that is not filled to capacity every minute of the day and into troublesome dreams of the night. We are created as creatures who need down time, silence, bland diets, and periods of fasting. We do not do well in arenas of endless excitement and in a life filled with plenty.
      The Lord’s Kingdom may be the place where our reward is revealed, but real and sacred life is lived in the miniscule moments of every day where we are called to be responsive to the words of the Lord in faithful obedience, general contrition, quiet prayer, generous time to someone who needs a listener, or in an acknowledgment of our real presence in the distances between ecstasy and plenty.
      A Holy Lent is a life being lived in the barren wilderness and between distant horizons, a sort of existence where faithful dependence on the Lord orders our lives in a holy piety neither orchestrated nor planned by man and our world. Only in the chaste barrenness of a holy time can we bounce off of our otherwise perplexing and way too busy lives. During a Holy Lent we are given permission to exercise large periods of our time so that we can find the Creator and Savior who owns and transcends all distance, space, and time.

Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com