In Our Wilderness
Mar 13, 2026 | By Tori Cook JE ‘26
The Lenten season puts us in mind of Christ’s wandering in the wilderness. This time was centering for him as he prepared to begin his earthly ministry, but sometimes for us it serves as a reminder of just how lost we have become in the jungle of our lives. We’re now over halfway through Lent. For some, good habits may be forming, and a deeper relationship with God blooming. But for others, it may feel a bit like how February is to New Year's Resolutions—enthusiasm diminishing and commitment fading, back into disliked yet familiar patterns.
It is easy, at this point in the season, to begin measuring our Lent in terms of success or failure. Did we fast? Did we pray more? Did we give up that designated comfort? When we look at our efforts through this lens, many of us discover that we are not particularly good at wilderness journeys. We are tired, distracted, and discouraged. The wilderness, we have come to discover, has a way of revealing not just our wanting, but our weakness.
Luckily, it is in our wilderness that Jesus comes to meet us.
When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, she is also living in a kind of wilderness. An outcast of society, she comes to the well during the hottest part of the day, alone at what was a social hub for women of the time. Having had 5 husbands and unlawfully living with a 6th, she is ostracized from her community. Not only that, she is also a Samaritan, a group for whom the Jews felt deep animosity. Who knows how long she had lived this way? Regardless, Jesus met her that day in her desert and spoke with her.
“Will you give me a drink?” he requests. The woman is stunned. This man, a Jew, would drink water drawn by her? She is incredulous. But Christ assures her: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” And luckily for us, that is the promise Christ extends to each of us in this season of Lent.
Christ asked the woman for literal water before offering her the eternally sustaining version. This may be a helpful way to frame the project of Lent. Our meager—or even our great—attempts at fasting and prayer might only be the precursors to our conversation with the Lord in our desert, where he offers us that which will truly sustain us for the rest of our lives. The intentionality with which we approach the Lenten season is beautiful, but it is not on our merits that the promise of Lent rises or falls.
With that in mind, do not be discouraged by the state of your resolutions this far into Lent. Rather, turn your awareness of the desert in which you walk over to the One who is coming to meet you in it. You may wake up tomorrow and find that Christ’s journeying has brought him to a mundane moment in your life in which he wants to participate. The ability to have this recognition is just as much the project of Lent as the abnegation of which we are so aware.
In this moment, we may discover that the point of the wilderness of Lent was never to prove our strength, but to lead us to the place where we were willing to receive the living water. And if we are willing to notice Christ there, we may find that the desert itself has become the well.