We’re grateful for the time-tested wisdom of Tom and Karen Wuest who have been faithfully present in their wilderness parish of the Brush Creek Valley in Southern Ohio for many years. We hope Tom's words of encouragement inspire you in your own place of faithful inhabiting. We hope you'll join us along with Tom and many others at the Inhabit Conference this year.
Hello Parish Collective Community!
Much has transpired in our world since we gathered in April 2019 for Inhabit. We have grieved many senseless killings amidst our ongoing struggle towards racial justice and equity. We have suffered through these pandemic years, which have deepened our social and political rifts. We are facing the devastating impact of myriad climate events around the globe. And since the Russian assault on Ukraine, we are living beneath the dark and oppressive shadows of fear and violence. These overwhelming realities can leave us feeling incapable of enacting change for good in the world.
I felt a similar sense of desperation during the second U.S. war with Iraq. I believed that justice and mercy should “kiss,” as the psalmist writes, but wasn’t sure how to live in a world filled with so much pain and violence, so many unanswered prayers, so many hurts unhealed.
During this season, I attended a theology conference in Toronto and met a Quebecois monk and asked if we could talk. That evening, Gil Bordeaux warmly welcomed me into his hotel room, and as we ate fresh fruit and drank cold water from a pitcher, I shared that I didn’t know how to live a life of following Jesus in a church that had calcified and no longer reflected the love of God. Gil listened with patience and compassion until I ran out of breath.
Then he told me, “If you care about the poor, do one thing and then another. If God is stirring you towards acts of justice on behalf of the oppressed, do one thing and then another. . .” With a rhythmic cadence, he repeated similar words of wisdom, which have continued to inspire me some twenty years later.
There is a season in any life of faith when we enter a kind of wilderness as we come to realize—often painfully—that our love for God is no longer dependent on what God will do for us or how God might answer a certain prayer.
Jesus enters such a wilderness experience during his forty-day temptation in the desert, when he makes one decision for love—and then another. Then he goes out into the world and continues to make one decision of love—and then another.
Ten springs ago, our family moved to this lonely Appalachian valley from Vancouver, British Columbia to build a life on the land and to love God by loving this place. The wildness of creation in this valley never ceases to inspire, delight, and challenge us, while the gap between our cultural and social sensibilities and the perspectives of our rural neighbors often leaves us feeling bewildered and alienated. And yet the ongoing ache of loneliness has opened our eyes to apprehend how the love of God is moving into our “borough” in unexpected people and places. In Jean Valjean’s words (from Les Misérables), we are learning that: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
I opened this reflection with a recognition of some of the larger moments of our shared history over the past three years. These moments usually happen “out there,” far beyond the reach of our daily lives and influence. But the church is knit together in small communities throughout the world and can respond to each person, each situation with the love of God. As my pastor friend, Jodi Spargur, said in the early days of the pandemic: “The church all around the world is being pushed out of its buildings. The realm of the sacred is being redistributed into the hands of ordinary people.” In each of our particular neighborhoods, we are being invited by Jesus to reflect the love of God and also to see the face of God in our neighbors. As we live in these rhythms of reflecting and seeing the love of God everywhere we look, we are building a resistance to hate from the ground up, reclaiming the gospel as the “Good Way” for us all.
May each of us live into this Good Way, giving ourselves each day, each passing moment, to the love of God, which is writing a story in which everybody is made for glory. In Christ, God has revealed a path of love that will lead us through the darkness of any age—and our work is to follow that good way into a good story for our places, our lives, the suffering world, and the whole groaning creation. I leave you with the lyrics of a new song, one we will be singing together at Inhabit.
SCROLL for additional content: Commentary ~ Resources~ Replies ~