Daily Lesson for May 28, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Deuteronomy chapter 8 verses 1 through 10:

This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors.2Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. 3He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. 5Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you. 6Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. 7For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. 10You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

Paula D’Arcy says, “God comes to us disguised as our life.”

Life always brings us into the wilderness. There is no other way around it. We cannot skip the wilderness if we want to get to the Promised Land. And that is because it is in the wilderness that we are shaped and formed and become a people.  It’s in the wilderness that we learn to depend upon God. God comes to us disguised as our wilderness way — uncertain, challenging, frustratingly long; yet also character and community-building, and faith-forming. In the wilderness we learn to give thanks for our daily bread and look deep within for springs of life. In the wilderness we learn to walk under the cloud each day and rest beside the pillar of fire each night.

The wilderness should never be romanticized. It’s hard. Many falter. If there were another way we’d take it. But there is no other way. There is no way other way other than struggle and doubt and the path of insecurity. No; we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But we trust God will come to us — disguised as a narrow path through a dry and weary land. 

Let’s stick to it . . .