Postcard from the Wilderness
Some fragmented thoughts on surviving a quad-bike ride, a visit to Botswana with my nephew, and the lessons of wetland abundance and desert flourishing
Saturday, July 29
Camp Kalahari, Botswana
A psalm of survival O, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from the back of a quad bike driven by my 15-year-old nephew. This poor man cried out in his heart, and the Lord heard him as the bike turned a corner way too fast. The angel of the Lord encamped all around the one who was terrified and who was hanging on with both hands to very narrow metal bars, and delivered him. Blessed is the one who hopes in the Lord. Oh, be in awe of the Lord, you saints. The Lord is near to those who imagine their bones shattering in a freak accident, and delivers those who admit the folly of riding all-terrain vehicles controlled by teenagers. The Lord delivers him from the bumpy ride. He guards all his bones, if not his fragile heart or that spinal situation, about which his chiropractor is certainly going to something to say. The Lord preserves the entire being of His servants, and none of those who trust in Him shall be condemned—maybe chastened a little, but not totally condemned.
Greetings from the wilderness! I am surviving. My apologies for writing to you late this week. I’m traveling with my second-eldest nephew, Caleb. This trip, to Botswana and South Africa, is the culmination of a long-nurtured dream.1
We spent two nights in the Okavango Delta, and now we’re at a camp on the edge of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, which I will forever remember as the place where I survived my first experience, and Caleb’s, on a quad bike. Honestly, he was quite a good driver; I was just a fretful uncle and a nervous passenger, and anyway, did he really have to go that fast?
Both the Okavango and the Makgadikgadi could be considered wildernesses, though of quite different kinds. The Okavango is a vast wetland, whereas Makgadikgadi and its crusty, saline soils are all that remains of a lake that dried up millennia ago.
I have been thinking about what these places lack: Mobile-phone service has been scarce to nonexistent, the wi-fi very limited. Population density (Botswana’s land is about the size of all of France but it has just 2.5 million people—about as many as live just within the city limits of Paris). There are few paved roads and no power lines in sight; both camps we’ve stayed at rely entirely on solar. There is no light pollution.
I have been thinking, too, about what exists in abundance: Without that light pollution, the sky blazes with too many stars to count at night, and at sunrise and sunset, the range of colors is so rich, so ridiculous, that I don’t think even a J.Crew catalog writer could name them all. It’s funny, too, that we imagine nature to be silent. It isn’t quiet at all. At North Island, our camp in the Delta, I woke around 3:30 a.m. both nights to something of a symphony—so many different tenor moans, deep-bass grunts, and uncategorizable snorts. In the morning, our guide told us that what I’d heard were lions, hippos, and elephants, respectively. And here, just around sunrise, I thought I heard the quack of so many ducks. They were actually the calls of pied crows, calling to one another as they scavenged for breakfast.
A few weeks ago at Crosspointe, I preached a sermon that focused largely on a verse tucked into Mark 5. Amidst the clamor of the crowds begging for healing and beset by so many demands on his time and energy, Jesus did an unexpected thing: “He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray.”
As I wrote that sermon, I wondered about the kind of wilderness Jesus experienced and I wrestled with how the reality of that wilderness might have differed from my notions of wilderness. I know I’m not the only one who has held onto stereotypes of wilderness. So often it has been used as a metaphor for alienation and wandering and irresolution. So often it has been seen as a place of unbelonging, a space of struggle.
Here in these Botswanan landscapes, though, I feel a gentle rebuke of my stereotypes. Often I’ve thought of the wilderness as barren, but the ones I’ve encountered in recent days are not at all. In fact, they burst with life, even here in the desert, which I suppose is more akin to the arid Near Eastern wilderness we read of in Scripture. That flourishing just doesn’t look the same as flourishing elsewhere. We don’t recognize it because we don’t understand it.
On the five-minute drive from the airstrip to the camp, Shati, our guide here at Camp Kalahari, pointed out a small herd of springbok. These particular antelope, he explained, were desert-adapted. Even without ready pools or accessible puddles of water, they can survive simply on the moisture contained within whatever plants they eat as well as on the morning dew. Truly, if I were the springbok’s brand manager, I’d be tempted to have their tagline be, “Fed by the morning dew.”
Often we think, too, of the wilderness as dangerous and rife with risk; isn’t that implied in the “wild” that’s built into “wilderness”? The Bible mentions jackals quite a few times, for instance, and almost always in the context of desolation. Until two days ago, I never paused to consider why they get saddled with such negative stereotypes. The jackals we’ve seen over the past few days, both in the Okavango and the Makgadikgadi, have been eager and curious, ears perked and eyes wide open—utterly and unmistakably alive. They’re resourceful. And at risk of centering human evaluations as a measure of another creature’s worth, they’re actually kind of cute.
Often we think of the wilderness as a frightening exilic space—lonely, set apart, distant from community and perhaps even love. But that’s only true if you tell the one-dimensional story in which you are the protagonist and your experience of the wilderness. What’s forbidding to one person—or one creature—feels familiar and even delightful to another. And perhaps the invitation for those of us who do encounter the wilderness, whether literally or metaphorically, is to be open to new forms of wisdom and knowledge and to be ready to perceive goodness and beauty in places we might not have noticed them before.
We went for a boat ride in the Okavango the other day, on a river that the local people call Xamoku. There were dozens of hippo, their eyes just peeking above the water, and on a little island of grass, one fat crocodile, sunning itself during a post-breakfast nap. Was this wilderness? Not if you ask the local women, who gather and dry the turpentine grass that grows at the water’s edge, which they, like their parents and their parents’ parents, use to thatch the roofs of houses. Not if you ask the fishermen who know the best places—mostly in the shallows—to spread their nets for bream and who can spot the difference between water moved by the currents, water shifted by the breeze, and water stirred by the presence of one of those hippos beneath the surface. “There’s a very aggressive one nearby,” one of them warned our guide, Zone, as he navigated our motorboat upstream.
In my sermon a few weeks ago, I said this: “‘Yet frequently He withdrew,’ it says, but not into nothingness, because the wilderness may be wild to some but it’s home to others—home to the insects and home to the ever-flowing spring, home to the birds and home to the jackals, home to all who are sustained by God’s provision and home to all who are nourished purely by God’s hand.”
Did you know that there are brine shrimp here in the salt pans? Brine shrimp! Also known as sea monkeys! Like the kind so many of us got as kids! The eggs just sit here, waiting for the waters to come. When the rains arrive, so does life. It could take years. They’ll wait. Such patience!
In my sermon a few weeks ago, I also said this: “The wilderness can seem harsh, yes, but it has its own soft side. In the wilderness, one witnesses God’s unusual, incomprehensible timing; it can seem so desolate for so long, and then, with an unexpected rain, it bursts into sudden and furious bloom, surprising carpets of dormant flower rolled out under the right conditions. All this together preaches a thousand sermons about all that we can’t know, all that is beyond our control, all that unfolds in the fullness of God’s time.”
Often we think of the wilderness as a place that might threaten our very survival. Maybe it is: When I asked Diesel, our ebullient guide in the Okavango, whether there were poisonous snakes, he smirked and said, “Yes, black mamba. But they are only there when I want to tell a guest not to get out of the vehicle. Then I say that there are black mamba.”
What if the wilderness could actually be a space where we get to reframe and perhaps even reimagine? I like to think that Jesus went there to recalibrate, recognizing the limits of his full humanity as well as the provision and the possibility of the divine. What if we saw it less as a metaphor for exile and more as an invitation into a more expansive vision of community and belonging, life and even mystery? I have to believe that a full appreciation of wilderness will finally help us to acknowledge our own full humanity—which is to say, our inability to know everything, our innate vulnerability, and the truth that there’s so much beyond our control.
A note of caution: Just as I don’t want wilderness to be fetishized and just as I don’t wish for it to become an inappropriate locale for trauma bonding, I don’t want to over-romanticize wilderness. I am not a sea monkey waiting around for rains that might or might not come anytime soon! I am not looking to the jackal as my newfound contrarian guru! Things die and become dinner—on the ground, the hyenas wait, and perched high up in that tree, a vulture watches. Nature is definitely often not pretty. And you could fairly and accurately quibble that the wilderness that Caleb and I are experiencing comes with the (nonnative-)creature comforts of safari. A metaphor is a metaphor, and you don’t want to take it too far.
But a metaphor is also a metaphor because it helps us to see things anew. In these wildernesses, I have glimpsed strange beauty and remarkable diversity—plants with tremendous resilience that can offer healing to others, animals that have found ways not just to survive but also to thrive where one might imagine only hardship and pain.
And maybe a metaphor is also a metaphor because, by taking a detour through the different, we can learn to see things as they actually are. In these wildernesses, I like to think that I’m slowly paying attention in new ways. I don’t know what most things are, and there is absolutely no shame in asking, “What’s that?”
Maybe it doesn’t all have to make sense.2
Maybe there’s freedom to be found in these wildernesses, especially if you stay off the quad bikes.
Maybe there’s liberation in humble unknowing, and in holy mystery, and in the willingness to sit with open hearts and perceptive spirits in the wild midst of it all.
All my best,
Jeff
p.s. Many thanks for all your kind words and encouragement and prayers about my ordination news. At this point, it’s looking like spring 2024? I’ve waited this long, so what’s another few months? I will keep you posted.
You can read more about the backstory here. Brief version: Years ago, I promised my nephews that when they turned 13, I’d take them anywhere they wanted to go. My childhood travel experiences, especially those subsidized by my uncles and aunts, were transformative for me; it’s not hard to draw a line from those adventures and my work today as a journalist with a specialty in travel writing.
Is this a caveat for this whole essay? Maybe. I’m still jetlagged! I didn’t sleep well last night!
Glad you are ok! Love the rewriting!
The wilderness breaks me….open. God flowing in, stress streaming out.
I too resonated with your beautiful and fun adaption of that psalm. Oh that we could live our lives more like that seeing ourselves in all our glory and fears in the psalms like David. I too was clenching when my fish tree drove me this morning. Wish I’d read this psalm first.
I also loved this”What’s forbidding to one person—or one creature—feels familiar and even delightful to another. And perhaps the invitation for those of us who do encounter the wilderness, whether literally or metaphorically, is to be open to new forms of wisdom and knowledge and to be ready to perceive goodness and beauty in places we might not have noticed them before.” Other forms of wisdom! Boy, I want to be on the look out for that!
I love all your writing and encouragement to see things from a other perspective. It’s so helpful for me the way you write deep truths in a story form and it helps me see God in my life stories. Thank you Jeff.