Worship in the Wasteland

Angry and hopeless, overwhelmed by questions with no answers.

Everything you hold shatters, turning to dust and running through your fingers.

What is this desolate wasteland?

Every step you take feels like the next right thing, but every step leads you further and further into desolation.

I was driving yesterday with the windows down and music playing. The warm sun and chilly fall breeze filled my face and released inhibitions. I felt free from the wasteland—a feeling I haven’t felt in a long time. 

I’ve been asking a lot of the Lord lately, and His answers, or lack thereof, have wedged a frustration and hopelessness deep in my heart. My weariness has left me vulnerable and weak, believing lies that slowly erode the wonder and awe I have of God. He seems small. He feels far away. 

This desert swallows me whole, and I feel lost.  

Continuing on this trajectory feels easier than fighting, but the weight is crushing my mind, body, and soul. Daily taking thoughts captive and heaving them heavenward is exhausting. Headaches and fatigue begin early each day and last for hours. Questions and doubts I make impossible to answer have become the liturgy for my spiritual discipline.

But to taste freedom under the sun’s rays and autumn breeze—it entices me to muster up something to fight a bit longer. 

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Lord, give me enough to hope today.

Today’s hope does not need to stretch to tomorrow. He is faithful to offer up daily hope, daily blessing, daily grace, daily mercy, daily bread.

Living this is hard. Trusting in the Lord’s daily provision to sustain the fight feels hard and impossible, but I see His faithfulness in every sunrise and each rise and fall of my chest in breath.

So I leap off the edge of darkness and plummet towards the speck of light. In this freefall is a wasteland of “no longer where I was” and “not there yet.”

In the wasteland, raw vulnerability and true natures of the heart are exposed to the scorching sun. Here there is heat, thirst, and struggle. Here there is a silly and absurd belief that God hasn’t left—no, He is in fact the One who leads us here. 

With this reality, we have a choice. Do we cast ourselves to the fires of hopelessness and despair, grumbling with the Israelites in the desert when the promised land wasn’t what they had thought and God’s provision wasn’t what they wanted?

Or do we follow in David’s steps and fall on our face in repentance of our hardness of heart? Do we offer a sacrifice of praise, trusting and believing God Himself will meet us there?    

Some days I sacrifice myself on the fires of hopelessness and despair. Some days I want the big miracles that the Pharisees demanded in order to believe, and when God doesn’t succumb to my feeble and petty request I stomp my feet in defiance.

Yesterday was different. Yesterday I chose to worship.

Worship looks different in the wasteland. Perspective shifts and the joy of the Lord doesn’t always come beaming out of our praises. Proclamation of the goodness of God and all He is doesn’t always translate to awe-struck wonder. 

In the wasteland worship meets us deep in the trenches of the soul. 

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Worship

When you find yourself—broken, beaten, bruised, weak, scared, and lonely—at the feet of Jesus.

When you offer your heart with trembling hands, and all you can muster is a sacrifice of tears on the altar of praise. 

Sometimes you open your mouth and breathe a melody—beautifully tuned or wildly off. None of that matters because the One who created your voice wants your melody. 

God wants your melody.
Coming before the Son of God in worship brings even the hardest of hearts to a place of intimate softness, revealing a sliver of hope that maybe goodness if found here.

When we fall into the wellspring of the fullness of God in worship, our bodies and souls revive, because we were created to find life here. Life in the presence of God. Life because, when we worship we make room to adore the Lord, proclaim His majesty, and rightly fix our eyes on the Lord.

When we enter the presence of God and worship Him— 

He breathes life into the darkest, driest, and deadest parts of us. 

He speaks Truth.

Our eyes are opened to eternal hope in Him.

He walks with us through the fire.

He remains faithful when we come up faithless.

Worship isn’t simply a song. 

Worship isn’t a show.

Worship isn’t a moment in church.

Worship is a recognition of God.

Worship is an offering of ourselves. 

Worship is when we lay our whole selves on an altar in the presence of God and say, 

“God, here I am, and I am pressing into all You are.”

It is when we bear up our cross and die, crying out in deep desperation with each drive of the nail, because something inside knows this is it—this is the last hope—dying to ourselves and hoping the other side is a holy God who hasn’t abandoned us in our failure and shame.

In worship we feel the holy breath of God illuminate the darkness of the soul, and when we open our eyes we find a holy goodness we are unworthy to receive.

In worship He reveals our worth is not found in our own eyes—our worth is named in the sacrifice of Jesus. And under His name we are worthy, we are cleansed, we are healed, we are whole. 

When we find the courage to worship, we encounter the holiness of God.

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Dear soul, are you here with me in your own wasteland? Are you taken captive by the battle for hope and belief that God is still good?

Today we can choose to worship. Against all odds, all lies, and all pain, you can worship—we can worship. May hope infiltrate the cracks, illuminating the beauty of our war-worn hearts. 

Deliverance from this wasteland may not come with tomorrow’s sunrise. It may not even come with years of sunrises. Still, we hold to the Maker of the wasteland, because He is also the Maker of the high places, and He is found abundantly in all of it.