Blog

Many years ago B.C. (before children), Tina and I were attending a church that we had been at for a couple of years and found ourselves at a place where we were rather discouraged with our “church experience”. It happened to also be the church that my parents were also attending, so our typical Sunday looked like Tina and I getting up and driving from our second story apartment in East Town (Grand Rapids) and driving to our church in Rockford. We would walk in, find the pew my parents were sitting in (yes we still used pew’s back in the olden days) sat with them, did a little singing, listened to a sermon that occasionally held my interest, stood during the final prayer, and then walked out to my Escort Pony and drove to my parents house for lunch before we would head back to our apartment.

A wilderness experience can be exhilarating and memorable—if you chose to do it, had a plan and knew that it was coming to an end! However, some wilderness experiences are not by choice, they are caused by others, there is no plan and there is no end in sight. How do we navigate wilderness experiences? David’s life has some lessons for us. After his big moment of victory over Goliath and all the popularity that went with it, David’s life became a wilderness experience.

Floods. Wars. Storms. Suffering. Death. Pain. Loneliness. What ever happened to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? We read about the mayhem. We see images on television and social media. We experience the struggle of death, grief and loss ourselves. It’s almost like we are living in a world that is not right! We don’t have to live in Gaza or Ukraine to experience the tension of war because the whole earth is a warzone. The bombs and bullets and destruction take different forms but we’re all experiencing the conflict one way or another.

As a country we are celebrating a birthday this weekend. The United States of America is turning 249 this year. What a country! Whether you consider our great nation a constitutional federal republic or a representative democracy, we have had quite a remarkable history. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses since 1776 but despite the struggles, the prosperity this country has enjoyed is unique. It is interesting that while we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world, we are not the happiest.

The Bible contains a lot of information about David. Some of it is not very flattering. If we were to think of all the information like a picture, we would see that the blemishes in David’s life are not removed. The picture includes all the warts, blemishes and spots in David’s life without “touch-ups.” Baxendale wrote, “God lets us see some blemishes in His best servants that we may neither be too highly conceited by flesh and blood, nor too much dejected when we have sinned.” The truth is, as humans, we are looking for the Ideal Human, whether we know it or not.