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Desert wondering

Don Ratzlaff

Paul Bunyan felled a forest with a single swoop of his axe. Government operatives conspired to kill JFK. Elvis Presley is alive and well and working at Taco Bell. Space aliens are abducting our neighbours.

North Americans love myths – those incredible stories that titillate our imaginations and spice our conversations. Sometimes I think we love myths more than we love truth, but that’s another story. Myths, in the popular sense, are nothing but pure, unadulterated bunk. In the end, though, who cares? Most of them are harmless – unless, of course, you really liked that neighbour who was abducted to Planet Xenon.

Generally speaking, myths aren’t dangerous . . . unless we believe them to be true and begin living our lives accordingly. Just ask the followers of the Hale Bopp comet. They bet their lives on a well-told cosmic tale – and lost.

Popular Christianity has its share of myths, too. Perhaps the most dangerous one is what I call the “Myth of the Dynamic Christian.” You’ve heard of this Dynamic Christian, haven’t you?

The Dynamic Christian:

experiences a rich spiritual vitality on a daily basis; feels the strong hand of God on his or her life; engages God regularly through Bible reading and prayer, and eagerly anticipates those daily quiet times; consciously and constantly strives “to do what Jesus would do” in the workplace or school; withstands the tragedies of life, if not with a smile, then with an unshakable belief in God’s sovereignty; has such a vibrant relationship with Christ that he or she can’t help but smile throughout the day; fearlessly witnesses to friends and co-workers, and prays for opportunities to do so; has answers to the most difficult questions of life – and, if an answer is elusive, is happily content to “leave it with God.”

The Dynamic Christian is everything we in the community of faith want to be, everything we feel we ought to be, and – more than we dare to admit – everything we too rarely are.

I may be speaking more from my own experience than from an accurate reading of the broader Christian community. It’s possible that your faith experience closely resembles the one I described as the Dynamic Christian. If so, this article may not be directly relevant to you. But I would ask you to read it anyway, if for no other reason than to recognize that others are not so fortunate. You need to know there is another Christian experience that is just as real, if not as glorious.

Destination or journey?

Key to the Myth of the Dynamic Christian is the notion that the Christian life is a destination. This notion suggests that once we commit our lives to Christ, everything should be hunky dory. We are “new creatures,” after all. Our doubts, uncertainties and frailties are a thing of the past. Christ lives in us. We have won the victory through Him. The struggle to find contentment, direction and fulfillment is over. But is that the way it really is?

We in the church have marketed the Christian faith – to ourselves and others – as a destination to inhabit, a mountaintop existence. But I’m convinced that Christian faith is more like a journey. It takes us to the mountaintop on occasion, thank God, but it also winds through valleys of disappointment, confusion and questioning. And sometimes it takes us into long, lonely, lingering deserts – places where God feels distant, where faith is dry, where we wander lost, directionless and lifeless.

This article may not accomplish much more than to admit publicly that the “desert” exists. That’s significant enough, because by buying into the Myth of the Dynamic Christian, the church only intensifies the frustration, emptiness and disillusionment of those living in the desert. You see, believers wandering in the desert feel alone. They come to church on Sunday, see everyone else in smiles and their Sunday best, and think, “They seem so together spiritually. They don’t have the doubts, the questions, the emptiness that I’m feeling. What’s wrong with me? I don’t feel like a very good Christian.” If we can admit the spiritual desert exists, we’ve taken one large step toward the truth.

I also hope to accomplish one more thing here: To assure desert Christians that they are not alone. That conviction is important if they are to find their way out of the wilderness. All of us need to know – to hear it said publicly – that most men and women of God traverse the desert at one time or another.

From one desert to another

I bumped into one of those men in Scripture not too long ago. John the Baptist’s dramatic ministry was launched from a literal desert. As Luke 1 makes clear, John was chosen by God for a special ministry: to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. By Luke 3, John is already the radical, outspoken, larger-than-life spokesman for God, the “voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord.’ ”

If any person qualified to be the prototype Dynamic Christian, it was John the Baptist. He lived in the desert for Jesus. He confronted the rich and powerful for Jesus. He wore wild clothes for Jesus. He even ate bugs for Jesus! Could there be a more on-fire man of God than John the Baptist?

But Matthew 11 reveals another side of John the Incredible Baptist. This John calls from a desert of another sort. Here, John the Desert Wonderer sends a couple of his disciples to Jesus with a question: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else”? Such a question from a man who ate bugs for Jesus!

Ultimately, a question of meaning

But isn’t that ultimately the question that gives meaning and definition to Christian faith? Isn’t that the same question that confronts each of us in the desert, in the dry times of our spiritual experience? “Are You, Jesus, really the one thing, the one person, the one hope, who can give our life meaning? Or should we look for something else”?

If you’ve ever dared to ask yourself that question, please know that you are not alone. In fact, you are in good company. You are walking where John the Baptist walked.

I could highlight other biblical characters. Jonah and Elijah had their own desert experiences. Certainly David is refreshing for his incredible honesty before God. In the New Testament, we find the followers of Jesus struggling: Peter during a storm, doubting Thomas, Paul in Romans 7. And, lest we forget, Christ himself agonized at His most trying hour, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me”?

It’s important to know we are not alone in the desert because when we can admit out loud, to ourselves, that we are spiritually dehydrating, perhaps we can also admit it to each other. You see, I am convinced that one reason the desert is so barren, so debilitating is that we feel we must walk through it alone. We can’t let others know of our plight because they will think less of us.

Avoiding the casualties

That is the real danger of believing the Myth of the Dynamic Christian. Because we keep to ourselves the reality of our condition, the Christian community suffers far more casualties than it needs to – as discouragement leads to disillusionment and finally to desertion from the faith. Wandering alone in the desert can lead to skepticism, (“My faith isn’t real for me, so it can’t be real for anyone else either.”) and to sin. When we are spiritually dry and tired, we are also vulnerable to the “somethings” and “someones” that can lure us from the path that leads to life. When we stagger through the desert alone, we often are not strong enough to resist.

Mike Yaconelli, writing in The Door magazine, says the church tries to make us believe “that genuine believers don’t have parts of them which disbelieve, that mature Christians never get angry at God or regret their decision to follow Christ, and that godly people don’t sometimes just get sick of God. None of this is true.”

What I call the “Myth of the Dynamic Christian,” Yaconelli calls “the secret self” – secret because, though it is a part of us, we can’t reveal it to anyone else. He describes it this way: “It is a place where our fears and loneliness congregate, where our insecurities run wild. It is the home of the exhausted self, the burnt-out self, the sick-and-tired self, the angry self, the hurt self, the abandoned self. It is the part of us so fresh, so current, so tentative, so fragile that we cannot allow that self to be seen, except by the most trusted of friends. . . . It is the self that is present when we don’t feel worthy to take communion, the self that visits in the midst of depression.”

The secret self thrives in the spiritual desert – and lurks in the heart of most Christians. In fact, the higher the profile, the more secret this self must become, because high-profile Christians – such as church leaders, teachers and pastors – must be Dynamic Christians. For if they are not, goes the reasoning, what chance does anyone else have to reach that state?

Loved for who, not where, we are

The truth is we have no chance to reach that state, at least not day in and day out. The good news, the voice we need to hear calling to us in the desert today, is that we do not need to reach it. We are not alone in the desert because each of us lives there from time to time. More important, we are not alone in the desert because Christ is there with us. Conversion does not deliver us from the desert; instead, Jesus becomes our companion in the midst of it. You see, Jesus loves us for who we are, not for where we are. Whether we’re on the mountaintop, in the valley or in the desert, Christ is with us – even when we can’t sense His presence intimately.

Jesus’ response to John the Baptist’s question is not insignificant. When John the Bedrock Baptist admitted his uncertainties, did Jesus condemn him? Not at all. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus told the crowd in Matthew 11. “Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” What words of personal affirmation for a man plagued with doubt! The good news is that no desert is so dry and broad that we escape the affirmation of Christ. You see, it’s not what we do, have done, or should do that matters most. It is who we are – people loved and redeemed by Christ. This is what Paul sensed when he proclaimed: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38).

A time for myth-busting

Maybe it’s time we do some myth-busting in the church.

First, we must admit to ourselves and to each other the radical notion that our walk with Christ takes us not only to the mountaintop, but also into the desert.

Second, we must say to ourselves and to each other that it’s okay to be in the desert. We are not alone there. Christ is with us even there; He loves us even when we wonder about – and even wander from – our faith.

The challenge is to be bold enough to admit to our sister and brother, “I’m not where I want to be. I’m not even sure where I am. Will you still walk with me”?

The challenge in responding to that confession is to resist the Myth of the Dynamic Christian and to say as a body of believers, “Yes, we will walk through it with you because we have been there too. We will walk at your pace, not ours. Together, we will find the way back to Life.”

In the midst of the desert, we hope in the Lord that He will renew our strength, believing that someday we will again soar on wings like eagles, or at least run and not grow weary – but today it is enough just to walk and not faint.

Don Ratzlaff is the former editor of The Christian Leader, the US MB periodical, where this article was published in April 1998.

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Last modified September 18, 1999.

© 1999 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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