Devotions - Thursday, March 6

Some of you know that I lived for six years in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. While there, I took full advantage of the opportunities to be outdoors. That included winter backpacking trips. With snow accumulations of over 200 inches, we hiked the trails on snow shoes. It wasn't the cold that I remember most about those trips, it was the long nights. That far north, the sun goes down around 5 pm. It doesn't come up again till sometime after 8 am. When you are backpacking, you limit your weight. You can't carry enough candles or batteries to keep the lights on for hours and hours.

We would eat our dinner and clean the dishes before it got dark. You can't build a campfire (the heat from a fire melts the snow and your "fire" is soon 3 feet deep in the snow drifts.) We lay in our bags and talk, but the exertion of the day brings sleep sooner than you would like. It was around 3 am that we would wake, and start to look for the morning. Those hours are also the coldest. You long for the sun to rise in order to experience its warmth; you know that you will be more comfortable when you are back in your full gear and moving and generating heat. But the morning is still a long way off. You lie there and you wait.

This morning, I was reading from Psalm 130. Verses 5 & 6 read:

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning.

Living in homes where electricity lights every hour of the day, we might miss the power of the Psalmist's words. When we go to bed, having stayed up late and watched TV, or read a book, we hope the morning doesn't come. Our nights are too short.

The person who penned these words and those who read them (at least for the first 2300 years) had a different experience. Nights were long and dark and often cold. The morning sun was a wonderful thing to see breaking the horizon.

Maybe this reflects a larger disadvantage in our spiritual quest. We, who have most everything we need in abundance, begin to feel self-sufficient. We experience no want; we are lacking in nothing. (I know that there are emotional wants and needs, and these cannot be overlooked. However, left with only emotional needs unmet, no wonder our experience of God has become relegated to matters of the psyche and seldom of the totality of our existence.)

The season of Lent is a time to reflect on our needs. It is a time to wait for the Lord. If you are having less than optimal success at this, try turning off the lights when the sun goes down and not turning them back on until the sun rises the next morning. Perhaps then we might understand what it is like to long for the arrival of the Light, into the world.