Life with God is a rollercoaster. Sometimes we experience feelings of closeness, clarity in direction, or a sense of God’s provision and purpose in our lives. At other times it can feel like chaos or silence—the dark night of the soul. A wilderness.
Gratitude in this wilderness season is a fruitful practice that helps us remember who God is even in the midst of uncertainty. It can also help us see the new life springing up and the new ways God may be shaping us.
In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses repeatedly encourages the Israelites to remember what God did for them when he delivered them from Egypt and led them through the wilderness. Tell your children and your children’s children, he says.
Remember. Tell your children.
Because sometimes you will forget it. And sometimes you won’t feel like worshipping and thanking God.
This is true when things are going well and we forget who has been providing for us all along. But it is perhaps especially true when we suffer or feel far from God. We may not really believe that God is on our side, that God is listening, or that God will do what he has promised.
Mere months after God had rescued the Israelites from the land of Egypt, after God had provided manna and water from a rock, after God said, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Ex. 19:4), and after they saw God descend on Mt. Sinai in a dense cloud, the people got impatient waiting for Moses to return. They said to Aaron, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us.” (Ex. 32:1) And after they had completed the golden calf they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:5)
We can tell this story to shame the Israelites as if we would have done no different, or we can think about how difficult it must have been for them and how easy it is for us to forget who God is and what God has done for us. How easy it is for us to create idols that we can control amidst chaos, fear and uncertainty instead of relying on the only one who can provide.
Despite God’s continual provision and guidance in the desert, the Israelites continued to forget; “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” they asked. (Ps. 78:19)
Thus Moses’ admonition in Deuteronomy: Remember. This becomes a recurring theme for the people of God. “We will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders he has done…so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments” (Ps. 78: 4,7)
This remembering, this gratitude for who God is and what God has done, helps us focus on God no matter our circumstance. To have hope and stay faithful—because God is always faithful to us.
For the Israelites, sometimes the wilderness was a literal desert. Sometimes it was captivity and exile. They were times when things were not what they were, when they cried out to God for things to go back to the way they were, for God to rescue them—and when God spoke to them in new and unconventional ways apart from previous institutions.
For us in 2020 we are in a different sort of wilderness. Things are not the same as they have been in the world, in our families, in our neighborhoods or our churches—and there’s no telling what things will look like in the future. On top of the pandemic we’re dealing with political division, economic uncertainty, and the heightened awareness of racial injustice where many continue to lament, long for, hope, and work for change.
Many of us as individuals and communities have experienced other times of wilderness in our lives, as well.
The remembrance we practice in these times is not always cheery and optimistic. Gratitude in the wilderness is a hard fought practice. It recognizes and gives thanks for what God has done in the past, cries out in pain for the way things are now, and calls God to act in the present in accordance with how God has in the past.
So when life gets hard and times get dark and confusing, remember how God has been at work in your life, in your family’s life, and in the life of your community in the past. Continue to give thanks for it. Cling to it. Be a witness, pass it along, and hold each other up.
And do the difficult work to look for where God is at work in the present.
Speaking to his people during another time of wilderness, God reminded them that God is the one who made a way through the sea and mighty waters in the past, but “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Is. 43:19)
The God who provided and worked greatly in the past is still at work now. God is making all things new but we have to look for it.
Do you not perceive it?
Stop, slow down, and make the space to practice gratitude at the end of the difficult days. Naming the small ways in which we have seen God in our lives helps tune our attention to God’s presence and action over time when it doesn’t feel big and dramatic.
God can set a table in the wilderness. And that attention to how God is at work even in the desert may be a clue to how God is shaping, forming, and leading us to be who he needs us to be when he sets us in the promised land.
This resource is part of the series In All Circumstances – A Theology of Gratitude. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Emily Beth Hill is a Campus Minister for InterVarsity Grad & Faculty Ministries, in Cincinnati, OH. She holds a PhD in Theological Ethics from the University of Aberdeen. Emily is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
