A couple of weeks ago I wrote about liminal space, a place in-between where things seem uncertain. I struggled with that particular post, and in the days that have followed, something about it didn’t feel right. I was honest, but not really touching what the term meant in this time and place in my life.
Now, I know why.
In this moment, we have all found ourselves in this middle-space. We have been tossed into this realm where everything we knew is now in question, and the future is unclear, uncertain. In ways emotionally and physically, we’ve found ourselves in the wilderness, left to wander and wonder how long, O Lord, how long.
As I pen these words, I’m still moving around out in the world. The company I work for has not yet closed its campus, and I’m expected to be there physically. By the time you read this, that situation may have changed. Things are in such flux that I find I have no idea if the Adult Christian Education curriculum we started on Sunday will be something we return to before Easter. Will there even be a service come Palm Sunday, or will, out of caution, we cancel and encourage everyone to worship at home?
The biggest struggle, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, with this wilderness-space is finding an answer to the question of what should I do? Where, in this time, this place does my passion and the world’s need intersect? What, when the problem seems so big, so overwhelming, can I possibly do? What sort of action brings redemption into a situation like this?
But that’s the hopelessness of the wilderness isn’t it? It’s why the Evil One tempted Jesus with these grand actions: turn stones to bread, perform some grand spectacle, rule the world. Inside this space, nothing but godlike action seems enough.
Jesus’ mission, however, consisted of small things. Sure, he could have healed every sick person, gave sight to all the blind, and stood proud beside a mountain of discarded crutches. Instead, he only touched a few. He could have ended famines by making the stones at our feet food. Instead, he made enough for breakfast after a long night’s fishing.
Here, in the wilderness, those actions don’t seem very big. They don’t seem as world-changing as the moment demands. But weren’t they? All those little things, they mattered. They altered reality. Not in the immediate, dramatic way the temptations offered, but like ripples in a pond that traveled, gathering energy and speed to become a wave. A wave that was fed by other ripples, those made by those who followed, and those who followed them.
This in-between moment in which we find ourselves is not forever, though, it can seem endless right now. Forty days, let’s remember, are a measurement of time beyond time. And in these days, like those before, it’s likely the smallest things that will bring us nearer to the moment that follows.
A moment like the dawn.