Sabbath Devotional :: Accepting the Wilderness

Several weeks ago, I found unexpected comfort in the words of Amulek. They came at the end of his sermon on prayer, the one where he tells the people to pray everywhere — in their fields and houses, over their crops and flocks, for protection from their enemies and Satan. And then he says: ye must pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness (Alma 34:26). It’s that last phrase that caught me: your wilderness. He uses it so casually that I hadn’t noticed it before. Wilderness, whatever. But this time it stopped me cold. Wilderness. That is the word that I started following in January, long before the pandemic, back when the coronavirus existed only in the streets of Wuhan, or so we thought. Your wilderness. Wilderness with a personal pronoun.

The Book of Mormon is different for me every time through. It’s like a Rorschach card where I find my own issues. Let me be honest and say that I haven’t read it countless times. I’ve made it completely through several times, and parts of it many times. This time the wilderness resonates — for more reasons than the pandemic.

As church members, we appreciate the idea of a wilderness, a major life trial, an unexpected and challenging change of course, in part because it’s so central to the opening of the Book of Mormon. Every time I read the beginning, I sympathize with Sariah who packs up her comfortable life of status to trek into the unknown because her husband has seen a vision. She leaves everything familiar behind and lives in a tent and I don’t think she was used to camping. Right from the start, we encounter this idea of wilderness. We use it to talk about faith, courage, perseverance, and obedience — and rightly so. After that, I tend to move on, tracking family life, miracles, visions, conflict, but I don’t usually follow the idea of wilderness.

My son was a missionary in Milan, Italy in February when the coronavirus took hold of that city and people began dying at a horrific rate. For several weeks, his mission struggled with the unknown. Would they stay? Would they be sent home? Were they in danger? So many questions and so few answers. They went into complete lockdown. During those weeks, I wrote him several emails, in one quoting a favorite passage: And I will also be your light in the wilderness; and I will prepare the way before you, if it so be that ye shall keep my commandments . . . (1 Ne 17:13). I told him that I knew he was in the wilderness, but I knew that God was with him, and I did.

Several weeks later, the pandemic reached Boston and it all felt different. I couldn’t believe that I had offered such sweeping advice in such a cavalier manner. Who was I to tell him to have courage and faith when I myself could barely function after two weeks of quarantine? The world lost shape and form. Days ran together. I was unmoored. “This is what the wilderness feels like,” I thought in the middle of the night when I lay awake worrying about my missionary, my other children in other places, the shortage of eggs, the rising case numbers, dangerous aerosols and the shifting school calendar. A mounting pile of loss.

As I continued week after week with the Come Follow Me reading, I noticed more references to the wilderness: people hiding there, people lost there, prophets warning of it. And then Amulek includes it in his list of places where we are likely to be and need to pray. I love Amulek. I love his introduction of himself as someone who had been offered gospel truths, but refused them. I love his transformation into a believer. I love him as Alma’s very able companion and I admire what he sacrifices to become that. I appreciate the journey that brings him full circle. In the beginning, despite his brokenness, he takes Alma in and restores him. When they are through preaching in Ammoniah, Amulek is weary, weak and alone, and Alma takes him to his home and restores him. This is a man who knows loss and heartache, who is rejected and scorned, whose family disowns him. When Amulek tells me to pray in my wilderness, I know he speaks from experience.

What I have begun to realize is that the wilderness is not a place that we will pass through just once, it is a recurring element of our lives. That probably seems obvious, but it has been a slow dawning revelation to me, one that makes the wilderness seem less punitive. Good and bad people pass through — prophets, warriors, evil high priests, tender converts, and our Savior.

The details will likely change, but the essence won’t. It’s a lonely place of emotion and weight and confusion. Today it is the pandemic, but last year it was something else, something equally unimaginable, and next year or the next there will be something different, something I would never choose or wish for. Illness, death, employment uncertainty, estranged children, depression, divorce. The list is endless. Somehow it feels better to know that for thousands of years people have struggled to make sense of this place.

Amulek’s simple phrase was an “aha” moment. His words don’t make me eager to be in the wilderness, but they remind me to set aside my anger and pray when I am there, which it turns out is more often than I expected. Sometimes the wilderness is what lies between us and Bountiful or our Promised Land. The only way there is through. Sometimes in the wilderness, I learn to be still and hear God. And if I listen deeply, I realize that I am not alone and that thought always comforts me.