Lent 2024 Week One: Leaving the Desert (Mk 1: 12-15)

In his book Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield explains that in our efforts to become successful we often “substitute a safer, lesser goal for the tough and exciting work [we] really ought to be doing.” This is to say that in the face of trying to achieve our true calling in life, we often appease ourselves by setting and achieving easier goals, feeling good about those achievements, when we’re really ignoring the true task of becoming what we were meant to be. Kate Bowler, in her article entitled “Idolatry Is the Most Seductive Sin” calls this living with “almost truths,” or fashioning achievable and safe goals, so that we can succeed! Bowler boldly states that in this mode of living, we are guilty of “worshipping” our own “golden calf,” fashioned by us so that we can follow our own controllable “false image” instead of making the tough journey to know the one true God.

What are the “almost truths” that you’ve become accustom to?
What are the lesser goals that you’ve achieved instead of the greater goals that you are called to tackle?
What is the “Shadow Career” that you’ve settled for in the face of the vocation you are meant to live?

Moses lead a people who were destined to know that one true God, but on the way they were tempted to settle for less. On the way, they wanted easier solutions. They became satisfied with just staying in their desert, with no law, and no water. They began to give up on the “Promise Land” and the God who loved them and wanted what’s best for them. They and their “gold” would find a way to make it work without the need for struggle. As he began his own journey, Jesus Christ himself was tempted to do the very same thing in the same sort of desert wasteland. Satan offered him the very same “almost truths” that he offered the sojourners of old, and us beginning our journey here today. Take the easy way and avoid the struggle!

But Mark’s Gospel offers this: “Jesus was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him. (Mk 1:13) In a similar sense, we too are out in “the wild,” needing help and an angel or two to care for us. We too are faced with the temptation of staying put in this easier setting, working on an easier set of goals so as to be “successful” at something when we really ought to be struggling to follow and succeed with the calling given to us at our birth, empowered by the “true water” form the One True God who set us on the path meant for us to walk!

It’s time to follow that path!

What are some ways that you need to be ministered to?
What are the real goals that need to be set, attempted and achieved on this true journey?