Wellnessmaxxing in the Wilderness

I very much enjoyed my whole day at home, yesterday. I gazed at my overgrown garden, patted Gloria the cat, cleaned my kitchen, did the laundry, cut some burrs off of Portia the Puppy, and held Ozymandias for like thirty glorious seconds. Today after church I’m back on the road for one more week. Matt has to give some lectures and sermons in some remote location, and I’m going along to hide in a cupboard and read a stack of books that I’ve been promising to get to for a couple of months, make some lesson plans, and hopefully stare into the middle distance. I miss my girls (in advance) but I need the week to get a grip on my life as I head toward the relentless demands of this forthcoming academic year.

I must confess, wandering up and down the lections over the last few days, the line that I have often found a touch too personal once again smacked me in the soul. I’m sure you remember it, from the Psalms. I’ll be good and provide it in context, instead of all on it’s own:

They tested God in their heart
by demanding the food they craved.
They spoke against God, saying,
“Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
He struck the rock so that water gushed out
and streams overflowed.
Can he also give bread
or provide meat for his people?”

In a twist of modern irony, this question has been answered for me in exactly the opposite way that any medical professional would prefer over the month of July. For three weeks I have traveled from one groaning table to another. The thing is, when you are taking a short class of any kind, where you have to think interesting thoughts in the company of other people, the most pressing anxiety becomes, What About The Food? The people who arrange these classes, in fits of anxiety, go all in. I certainly did, hosting four or so years of Catechesis Formation at my church and always being So Anxious about the snacks. I would rush to Aldi and buy everything and then arrange it all on big platters. I was so worried that the course participants would experience even one single pang of hunger that I over bought every single time.

And thus it was in these two formations in July. Where-ever I turned, there was a table replete with breakfast and lunch and snacks and, down there in Atlanta, dinner as well. But no exercise in between to justify the continual consumption of food. The long journey is from one chair to another. I ate with abandon and then just thought I wouldn’t take much of a walk during the breaks, so as not to be overtaxed in any way.

Having enough food, unless you are Ariana Grande (who is currently on my prayer list, my goodness), is not really a problem that most people in this part of the world are anxious about. It’s not the quantity—I mean, it is the quantity in that there is much too much—it’s the quality that’s the problem. Of all the available choices, what should I eat? At what time of day? To assist in gaining this knowledge, if I cared to, I could read all the labels on the packages of food I buy. I could purchase a continual glucose monitor. I could track my steps. And if I had an apple watch (I don’t, praise heaven), I could have my heartrate continually before my eyes.

While folding laundry, I happened upon a New York Times conversation between two people discussing whether or not it is really better for us all to know more about the hidden inner-workings of our own particular bodies. It will probably be the case, they said, that anyone who can afford it will soon be able to get a full body scan showing every little abnormality. But should they? That was the question.

Toward the end, one of them admitted that continually prodding, and looking at, and trying to measure every little biological function means that many of us, “Treat our bodies as a source of constant anxiety.” That, I think, is the understatement of all of human history, from the moment Adam and Eve took that first bite and then looked at themselves and wondered why they felt so chilly and exposed. If you want to listen to the whole thing, here it is:

It’s so hard to imagine, in the world I currently inhabit, what it would be like to come to the end of a long day and be really hungry. None of us have to starve, unless we decide to on purpose. But that is the problem we are presented with in the Gospel appointed for the day. Jesus has heard about the death of John the Baptist, and so grieved is he that he goes away to a “desolate place.” Let’s see how Matthew describes the scene:

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

I’m not sure what they would’ve found to buy. Certainly not the gorgeous big cauliflower I gathered to myself at the Price Chopper yesterday, which my mother then steamed and lathered in a cheese sauce. Was there anyone left in the towns who could have sold the food? This is a vast throng of people who normally would have taken the trouble to provide for themselves the evening meal. They would have thought about it the day before, and then the morning of. Indeed, their preparations would have begun months before with the planting of grain and mending of nets with which to catch fish. You didn’t just arrive at six o’clock in the evening and ask yourself what you felt like eating.

But these people had come close to a Person who had shown himself powerful enough, and kind enough to heal all their infirmities. And he spoke to them in parables. It seemed he had the words of life. When he slipped away to grieve and pray, they couldn’t bear it and followed him. Seeing them, he is moved to pity, puts aside his hoped for retreat, and spends the whole day with them. They listened to him so totally that they appear to forget entirely about the evening meal. And this must be a catastrophe. For a crowd of first century agrarians, plus their wives and children, is no small catering problem.

But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

It’s not nearly the size of the throng that suddenly fled from Egypt, their kneading bowls bound up in their garments as they ran past the two heaped up mountains of water on the right and on the left. They had done all that Moses commanded them. They killed the lamb, painted the door posts, roasted the meat, ate it in haste, and then went out into the night, anxious and ready to grumble.

Once free, their enemies dead in the waters of the Red Sea, they found themselves thirsty and hungry. Even then it didn’t occur to hem to ask God for help. No, they blamed him. They assumed, immediately, in their need, that God did not care for them. What happened next is told over and over and over again through the Old Testament. The Psalmist says “They tested God in their hearts,” and “They spoke against God.” He delivered them by signs and wonders, but did he have the ability or inclination to spread the table, laying the cloth, the cutlery, the candles, the array of viands and legumes, the water and the wine that maketh the soul feel like it can last through the night?

In his wroth—the wrath of God is such a strange thing to consider—

Therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of wrath;
a fire was kindled against Jacob;
his anger rose against Israel,
because they did not believe in God
and did not trust his saving power.
Yet he commanded the skies above
and opened the doors of heaven,
and he rained down on them manna to eat
and gave them the grain of heaven.
Man ate of the bread of the angels;
he sent them food in abundance.

Nehemiah tells us that, though they “acted presumptuously” and “stiffened their necks,” for forty years they “lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell.” Imagine, wearing the same outfit for forty years.

In other words, its not like current obsessions with health and wellness are anything new. Whether there is plenty to eat or nothing at all, the human soul is anxious. Will there be enough? Even if there is enough, is it the thing I want? Will I ever be satisfied? Will I wake up one day and discover there is something wrong with me? Will any doctor know what to do about it? From one generation to another, these essential worries crowd the mind and clutter the heart.

And God stands there, full of compassion, full of patience, offering the real and true remedy for our need—Himself. He himself is the bread, the wine, the Lamb that takes away all the sins of the world. He provides the clothes. He lights the way and the Table itself. Each and every element of our peculiar need is answered in full measure by him, not with other stuff, but by his own Body.

But that Body is hard to accept, even when I become exceedingly desperate. For it means admitting that all my preoccupations and preparations have been inadequate. They have not given me the thing I wanted most of all, which is a life that lasts forever full of love that I arrange for myself. I will be well, I say in fits of spiritual forgetfulness, by my own almighty, though increasingly flabby arm.

The fruit of this sort of spiritual self-reliance is anger against God and heaping platefuls of blame. Why isn’t he helping me do the thing I desire to do? Why did he put this tree here, in the midst of the Garden, if he didn’t want me to snack away all afternoon? I want all the health, all the beauty, all the comfort of my own way and God must assist me in my task.

But for brief, bright moments of fellowship, sometimes the people of Israel, and the people who sometimes go to church, forget themselves. They wander into a pew, or into a pasture and they listen, even against their will. And what they hear and see and taste and touch is so astonishing that they go away full and satisfied. Their soul’s consolation is not more dinner or more stuff, but Jesus. As they give themselves into his care, they discover for themselves that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus their Lord because he was always the one setting the table.

Seriously, I beg you, go to church.