It's easy for me to feel Lent as a wilderness simply by looking outside. The snow is getting old, the sky is grey, the dark comes too quickly. Its easy to feel alone.

Luke 4:1 starts off with Jesus being led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days. Often, the wilderness can feel overwhelming. I think of it as a very lonely place. Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, and he was alone. Yet, the scripture speaks of the Spirit and the devil. He was tempted away from his community and his support.

Melanie Morrison, in her book The Grace of Coming Home speaks of Holy Ground. "You probably have a place, some special place, that may look very ordinary to others but to you is very precious because of something that happened there  --  an encounter in which you realized beyond all doubt that you were not alone and that you were loved. That special place may be a room in a house, a restaurant, a beach, or a forest where you once walked with a friend. While you were talking, you found the courage to say out loud things you had never dared to say to another person for fear of being misunderstood or judged.  At that moment, in that place, you had a sense of coming home, of being found."

Imagine, Jesus standing in the wilderness, the devil appearing to him and saying, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread. And Jesus held his own. And the devil tried to tempt him again after forty days of fast and Jesus stood strong. I like to think that it was Jesus, with the Spirit, standing on Holy Ground. That in the midst of the wilderness, it was on that place that Jesus resisted temptation, it was in that spot that He stood strong - that He wasn ' t alone.

As we spend our forty days in this Lenten wilderness, preparing for the joy that is to come, that we are able to stand strong, to grow, to acknowledge the Holy Ground that we stand upon

.