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Then they spoke against God; they said, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?  Psalm 78:19  NASB

A table in the wilderness –  שֻׁלְחָן, בַּמִּדְבָּר šūlḥān bamidbār.  Eighteen years ago I started writing Today’s Word.  It didn’t begin with that title.  In fact, it began with a personal email to a friend who lived in Grand Cayman, and who still reads these efforts every day.  That was 8,027 posts ago.  Seems like a lot, but I sometimes feel like it was yesterday and I am now writing just the next one.  Many, many things have changed after 8,000 posts.  Much of what I believed as a Christian evangelical has become part of the history of this journey.  It is no longer how I think and feel about religious things, but it was the path that got me here, so it still matters.  I wouldn’t be eating from the table in the wilderness without having trod the long road to get to this point.  I’ve also learned that the meal changes with time.  What I found nourishing and delightful seventeen years ago no longer satisfies.  But the table is still here, every day.  I just have to remember that it is a table in the wilderness.

These days I have a tendency to focus on the location rather than the nourishment.  I look around me and see more and more wild places, more chaos, more uninhabitable conditions.  I see the worldwide degradation of human beings, the deliberate attempt to reduce into pixels and digital packages what makes each of us really human.  I see sheep being led to the slaughter without a whimper of complaint or concern, as if the shepherds know what’s best for them.  I feel evil on the rise.  The wilderness howls at me.

But God prepares nourishment anyway.  That’s the point of a table in the wilderness.  It isn’t the wilderness that’s in control.  My focus needs to be on the table in this most unusual of places.  The table is there to demonstrate that God cares, that God knows, that God reigns.  I am in the wilderness on purpose.  Oh, it might not be my purpose.  I’d rather be at the beach.  But for reasons I don’t understand, God has me here, at the table in this most inhospitable place.  My purpose is to let Him fulfill His purpose.  And today that means sitting at His table and being nourished.  I will eat, and pass the food on to you.

And maybe that’s what He intended me to do all along.

Topical Index:  table in the wilderness, šūlḥān bamidbār, Psalm 78:19