Day Twenty

Psalm 95

6 Come let us worship and bow down:
and kneel before the Lord our maker.

7 For he is the Lord our God:
we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.

8 Today if only you would hear his voice — 'Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah:
as on that day at Massah in the wilderness.

9 When your forebears tested me:
put me to proof, though they had seen my works.

10 'Forty years long I loathed that generation and said:
'It is a people who err in their hearts, for they do not know my ways.

11 'Of whom I swore in my wrath:
They shall not enter my rest.'

"As with Jesus, so with us, there is no escape from the human situations in which we find ourselves. God will not say 'Abracadabra' and get us out of it. Nor will he supply us with a spiritual drug to deaden whatever doubt or anxiety or fear or pain may come our way, and cheer us up so that we feel good. Perhaps we confuse escape with something quite different: victory. For Jesus there was no escape. But there was victory. Yet how, if He died deserted by men and feeling forsaken by God? How victory?

The victory consisted precisely in not running away, in not trying to escape."

From "The True Wilderness" by H.A. Williams
(Library of Anglican Spirituality ed. Susan Howatch) 1994 p46