Following Jesus in Desert Places – by Greg Albrecht
Friend and Partner Letter from June 2026:
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in a promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Issac and Jabob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to a city whose foundation, whose architect and builder is God (Hebrews 11:8-10).
Seventy-one percent of planet earth is covered by water—of the remaining twenty-nine percent of “dry land” almost one-third is desert. A desert is normally defined as a difficult, if not impossible, place to live—“uninhabitable”—incapable of supporting life.
Dry, uninhabitable wildernesses are facts of life, both physically and spiritually. The Bible, particularly in the history of the Old Testament Hebrews, is filled with desert stories. On the one hand biblical desert stories are stories of survival and miraculous deliverance, while on the other they are stories of frustration and anger and death. Several lessons loom large in biblical desert stories:
- In a harsh, apparently unforgiving and inhospitable environment of a desert, human beings are more likely to look for God and listen to him—in what seems to be either a physical or spiritual (or both) place of death, we pay more attention to and place greater value on the eternal life God gives.
- A spiritual desert place we experience when we walk through a valley of the shadow of death can burst into our lives unannounced, unappreciated, and uninvited. Those brief times in our lives filled with comfort zones, certainties and securities, times when we mistakenly think we are in control of our life, can be rudely interrupted by a divorce, by the loss of a loved one, by the diagnosis of a terminal disease, either our own or a loved one, or by a unforeseen out-of-nowhere horrible accident. The well-watered garden of plenty in which it seemed we were living, an existence we thought would go on forever, is suddenly upended and now physical existence seems—apart from God—a mirage, an illusion. Nothing is permanent or secure or eternal about physical life—it is all, apart from God, brown, dead, lifeless, dying and hopeless.
- BUT—our spiritual desert experiences that may seem to be places of death and defeat, can actually blossom, as we follow Jesus, the river of life (John 7:38) and in the midst of our dry and parched desert we can burst into bloom (Isaiah 35:1), transformed with new life, growing and maturing in Christ.
With the exception of the last century or so, during the vast history of humanity on this earth deserts have not been regarded as a desirable place to live—deserts have not been high on the list of places where people imagined building their dream home.
Desert life is as unstable as shifting sand, and for that matter, both in the biblical desert stories and in the people groups and tribes who barely scratch out a life in these inhospitable places, tents and temporary huts provide short term housing. Permanent physical homes in the here-and-now present, on this side of eternity, are not the biblical model, certainly not in the Old Testament nor in the New Testament either.
As a result of the death of my father when I was just fifteen months old, my early life was unsettled. My widowed mother and I moved from place to place, living with one relative and then another, never remaining in one location for more than a year. As a widow and single mother, she was searching for a life of stability and safety for us. When I read the Bible as a young man my early transient experiences helped me relate to the nomadic life of Abraham,
I was seven years-old when my mother remarried, but we continued to move from place to place (five rented apartments and bungalows in eleven years). This wayfaring existence helped define my life until I went to college.
After my wife Karen and I married, during the first years of our marriage (five years in England and then two more years here in the United States) we were always “on the move”—living at eight addresses during our first seven years of marriage. Frequent transfers, new assignments and marching orders, and the fact that we were always assigned an address to live, rather than choosing it, made this habitual packing and moving existence feel more like the military than it did ministry.
In 1974, when we arrived back “home” in the United States one of our goals was to find and purchase a modest house which we hoped would be our home for a long time. Given our own experiences we wanted stability for our son and daughter. Though there were times when it seemed the dream of staying put would go up in smoke, it all worked out.
Of course, remaining in one house for many decades was not the primary value we had for our family, but we did value any form of stability we could provide for our children. We still live in that small modest house—this month marks the 50th year this little house has been our home.
Today, given the upheaval in our economies around this world, owning a home (or at least living in one while paying the bank until one day one might actually “own” the house) is a pipedream. It is a sad reality that many people today are moving from residence to residence at a similar frequency as Karen and I did with our two small children in our early years of marriage in England. Sadder still is the awful reality of homelessness—a plague that affects people who are already struggling, forcing them to find temporary shelter as they attempt to survive in a ruthless and unforgiving world.
The spiritual lesson in all our physical wanderings (and wonderings!) is clear. Houses are only buildings—structures of wood, stone and brick. A town or place is also temporary—fire, floods, tornados, hurricanes and of course wars, crime and violence can wipe out a “place” that was once home.
The point of the passage in Hebrews is that Abraham’s faith was in a kingdom not made of linen, wool and animal skins used for tents (or in our day, wood, stones and bricks). As we follow Christ, we look for a kingdom we cannot physically see, one whose walls and ceilings and rooms we cannot touch or decorate or repair (indeed, the kingdom of heaven does not await our repair!).
Our true home in Christ is not a building made of brick and mortar—with a picket fence and flowers, a driveway and a garage. My true home on this earth is not a house in which my wife and I have been privileged to live for 50 years. Physically, our true home is each other and our family. In a similar way, and more importantly, our spiritual, eternal home is not constructed with nails and lumber, it doesn’t have doors and windows—our true, eternal home is, by God’s grace, the kingdom of heaven.
It seems to me that the overarching lesson of desert stories in the Bible is to teach far-reaching spiritual truths, including, but not limited to:
- If you concentrate on putting down roots in this world’s civilization, if you are focused always on getting and achieving and accumulating—then you will never feel you have enough.
- If your efforts are spent building a paradise on earth featuring a mansion and a fortune, you will always tilt at windmills and forever crawl toward a distant mirage—never finding what your heart is looking for.
The Bible begins its story in the book of Genesis in a garden—a paradise created by God. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, ends in another garden, the city of God to which our passage in Hebrews says was the focus of Abraham’s wanderings.
The Bible is filled with desert stories of human history, flanked by two gardens in paradise.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going John 14:1-4, my emphasis).
Jesus uses language of time and space, language of limitations, boundaries and dimensions to describe our eternal home. The kingdom of heaven is, of course, not a place we can locate on a map charted by humans. The kingdom of heaven does not have size or borders or human population. The kingdom of heaven is not affected by storms or winds or earthquakes or floods. The kingdom of heaven is where God is, was and always will be. He is our eternal home.
Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong…
(Lyrics from “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver).
Following Jesus with you, on our journey to the city of God, our Father’s house,
Greg Albrecht
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