Through the Valley

By Andrea Lingle

What is salvation? 

Salvation means to be removed from harm: to be snatched from the burning bus tipping off the edge of a crumbling cliff wall into a quagmire of lava and quicksand by a cape-and-spandex-wearing super-human.

What of those caught in the rubble of bombed out buildings? Why are they not saved?

Salvation means to be removed from harm: to be rescued from a deflating lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane just before the sharks batter their way past your one remaining oar by a sleek and efficient helicopter.

What about those who are not found in time? Why are they not saved?

Salvation means to be removed from harm: to be fed, clothed, visited, tended, listened to, educated, protected, and loved.

What about those who are hungry, naked, lonely, abandoned, ignored, repressed, attacked, and forgotten? Why are they not saved?

We have an idea of what salvation means, how it works, and who deserves it, but the Divine story doesn’t always shape up the way we think it should. We are asked to walk through the valley enshrouded by death. We are told to walk into a valley knee deep in bones and speak to them. Speak to that which died in our lives and ask it to live. Salvation is not victory over life. It is victory over death.

Not victory after death. Victory through death. Within death. Down in the valley all carpeted by failure, we are accompanied by the Sprit of God. 

Once upon a time, there were a nation of people who had become enslaved to the empire of their time. They were robbed of choice and the production of their hands was stripped of its meaning. They were forced to work beyond the endurance of their bodies through sanctioned brutality. Their blood and tears soaked the ground, and their children died for the sake of insulating power from threat.

God heard the cry of the suffering ones and delivered them from slavery to the wilderness. There was a promised land, sure, but for the length of my lifetime, God camped in the wilderness with ex-slaves.

And when they were hungry: they were given one day’s worth of bread and meat.

And when they were thirsty: they were given a rock to drink from.

And God was with them in the valley of the wilderness.

Salvation is not escape. Jesus proved that. Jesus suffered unto death. We suffer. God suffers. What, then, is Salvation?

Salvation is a whole lot like manna in the wilderness.