In the midst of tender days, days when it’s desperately hard to find hope, I retreated to the desert to pray. 

13 miles into the desert, to be exact. 13 miles of twisting, turning, washboard road, unfurling away from the main highway. 

There are times you have to go where you are fully unreachable, to fully feel how God never stops reaching for you, has always been reaching for you. For all of us. 

Somewhere between mile seven and eight, I thought I was going to puke. 

Maybe it was more than the road tossing and heaving and hair-pin turning us more than 4 stories above the Chama River. Maybe it was more than this nauseating road shaking and rattling us free from all our false moorings, from so much of our identity and security being cemented in what we can produce and how we can perform instead of how we are made to deeply enjoy the presence of God. 

If you see every wilderness as an invitation to retreat into the hope of God, you’ve made the retreat that always wins the battle. 

Maybe, on some levels, my nausea was more about this terrifying movement from hustling striving to hushed silence, from civilization toward isolation, this movement away from working to earn acceptance through passable productivity, and this movement toward resting in an acceptance that is rooted simply in being, a journey away from the constant white noise of distraction, toward coming directly face to face with holy God Almighty Himself.

“I’ve just got to get out – just get out for a minute,” I murmur to my friend behind the steering wheel, as I reach for the door handle. Got to get some air, get grounded. 

I walk and breathe, just breathe. The ground under my feet, this earth, keeps heaving with tears and lament and heartbreak and all kinds of feelings of hopelessness and there’s this dusty red road beckoning like a Red Sea Road of real deliverance out into the wilderness to hear a word of God. 

What if whatever wilderness you find yourself in, you’re where it’s possible to finally find a word of hope from God? 

“There I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her, there she shall respond as in the days of her youth.” Hosea 2:14-15. 

I stand at the edge of the road, look off into the desert, to the mountains, and perhaps it’s possible that what my soul is hearing changes everything: 

If you see every wilderness as an invitation to retreat into the hope of God, you’ve made the retreat that always wins the battle. 

There is no sound here. No noise, no drone or whirl or hum or buzz of life – there is only the depths of stillness. 

There is only life in God. There is no life to be found anywhere else, in anything else, through anything else, and there is a way to live a whole life wholly in God.

The reality is, the hope is, ultimately only this: There is only life in God – all else is deadening… all else is deadening distraction.

When we finally rattle our way to the very end of the road an hour later, when the world and cell service have fallen quietly away, all there is left is to walk our way the last leg into the dark of the canyon and deeper into this thickening silence. We park behind the sign that reads “Peace – Christ of the Desert Monastery.” Pulling our winter coats tight around us, we set off on the trek through the cold of the desert night and out toward the guesthouse. Over our heads in the expansive darkness spills this benediction of shimmering stars. 

This is always the blessing: There is only life in God. There is no life to be found anywhere else. Already the desert is yielding fruit that I didn’t know I was starving for and that’s all I keep hearing, tasting: There is only life in God. There is no life to be found anywhere else, in anything else, through anything else, and there is a way to live a whole life wholly in God.

As we walk round one of the road’s curves, we hear this sole lonely bell ringing atop of the dimly lit adobe prayer chapel, this quiet intoning invitation across the desert to all who can hear, to all to come bow their heads with the psalmist before their Maker.

The surest way to know whether you have been fooled into being the walking dead, or if you’re actually living a life in God, is whether the hours of your life are centered around prayer with God.

So we to make a run for it through the pitch black wilderness dark, down and around gravel paths and desert bushes, trying to make it in time for the last prayer of the day. 

Breathless, we dash up the steps of the prayer chapel, exhale – try to soundlessly open the old wooden door – and step in. 

Inside the warm candle-lit glow of the prayer chapel, there’s only the rising sound of the Psalms as prayer-song filling the rising space. 

These men of the cloth, these Benedictine monks, pause the work of their hands eight times a day, to come and simply, without any fanfare, pray the Psalms. Day after day. Week after week, year after year, decade after decade. 

How have I never really known: The only way to keep time, the way to keep up with time, the way keep taming time – is to keep praying the hours to keep company with God who lives beyond time and holds all of time in His hands.

I can feel my soul settling: The way to most accurately keep time is to keep praying the hours, as the Son of God did, so you keep pace with God, so you keep going the speed of God. 

Maybe those who retreat from the world to pray, to wait on God, to hope in God – haven’t left the real world, but have entered the realest world of all. 

All around the world, as tears fall, as night falls, as missiles fall, as people fall, as empires fall, as families fall, as hopes fall — these Psalm-prayers keep rising from the pray-ers eight times a day. 

Being still to know God in prayer — is a strategic retreat to ultimately know how God is with us, so we’ve already won everything that ultimately matters. 

Retreating to be still in prayer is a strategic retreat so you can re-engage with victorious hope.

As the Psalm-prayers in all our voices keep filling the chapel,  this startling reality fills me: 

The surest way to know whether you have been fooled into being the walking dead, or if you’re actually living a life in God, is whether the hours of your life are centered around prayer with God.

And I’m struck: Maybe those who retreat from the world to pray, to wait on God, to hope in God – haven’t left the real world, but have entered the realest world of all. 

If we were to rightly see the realest world, we would know the first right answer to every wrong in the world is taking it all right to God in prayer. 

Maybe: The realest world is not the world of big plans and long meetings and flashing headlines and self-help masquerading as gospel hope or everything else that will blow away, dust in the desert wind… 

The realest world is the one that knows there is a battle in the heavenlies to divide, steal, kill and destroy, and the only way to know any winning is to first be still in prayer and hope in God to do the delivering.  

The realest world is not the one where the powerful have microphones, laws, or weapons in their hands, but the one where we are on our knees with bowed heads and open hands, before the One is most powerful in all the universe. 

If we were to rightly see the realest world, we would know the first right answer to every wrong in the world is taking it all right to God in prayer. 

Hushed – and convicted – I try to find the page of Psalms everyone in the prayer chapel is quietly praying. 

“I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and He will hear me. I sought the Lord in my day of trouble. 

My hands were continually lifted up all night long… I will remember the Lord’s works; 

Yes, I will remember your ancient wonders. I will reflect on all you have done  and meditate on your actions.

God, Your way is holy. What god is great like God?

You are the God who works wonders;  you revealed your strength among the peoples. With power you redeemed your people…“

Psalm 77

How many Psalm-prayers of hope, just over the last week, have these people quietly prayed? How do I have agency, real choice, to actually live a life of prayer – instead a life of production? Because: Do I ultimately believe that a life of prayer is what actually produces the greatest good in my life and in the life of the world?

And looking into the faces of they prayer-warrioring monks, my heart keeps pounding with the question: How is my heart aligned with the Word of God, the Ways of God, the Will of God – simply by praying God’s Word constantly to God?

You won’t ever be of any real earthly good, until you’re constantly heavenly minded. 

I’m trying to focus on the next Psalm-prayer, but all I can think is how they say: “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re of no earthly good” – but I’m standing here singing Psalm-prayers with a community that lives in God, that lives a life of Psalm-prayers because what moves the universe is not any man’s to-do list but the hand of God, and all I can think is what these souls who never stop praying actually know:

 You won’t ever be of any real earthly good, until you’re constantly heavenly minded. 

And something that feels like the ache of repentance is breaking tender within me and I’m blinking it back as we whisper-sing-pray the next Psalm. 

When prayer isn’t a daily life priority – it’s proof you don’t rely on God but rather your own self-sufficiency. 

If God only plays a backup genie in our drive-by prayers, our lives betray how we feel like we’re ultimately the one at the wheel, calling all the real shots. 

If God only plays a backup genie in our drive-by prayers, our lives betray how we feel like we’re ultimately the one at the wheel, calling all the real shots.  

When we pray little — it’s actually God who we see as little in the “real world” of our schedules and strategy and success. 

If we have little time to pray – it’s God who we’re belittling. 

The one who prays little has a large ego. 

Was that the first word of God when I entered into the wilderness: Repent – and pray. 

Repent and want Me more than all else.

On the cusp of Advent, I pray, and pray throughout the day, and keep turning to God, and on the dark days, in a world that aches with darkness, I quietly keep returning to it:

When you can’t find hope, the first place to begin looking is getting down on your knees. Get down on your knees in prayer and that’s where you begin to find slivers of hope.

And hope isn’t about getting what you planned, but getting to be in the presence of Hope Himself, prayerfully aligning our heart with His, aligning our hands with the only Hand that turns the world toward the light and revolutionizes everything.

Until there is a de-centering of our plans, our productivity and our performance, and a daily centring on our God in prayer — all our world slides destabilized.

Even now, the desert and all this dark can fill with the light of all His Hope.

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Come away this season & centre on Christ alone