The Road to Companionship

‘¢Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.’’ — Exon. iv. 27.

HE words were spoken to Aaron. The

going into the wilderness is not commonly suggestive of sociality. A wilderness is deemed a lonely place. They who enter it are supposed to be shunted, driven from the presence of their kind, deprived of the means of future usefulness. When the Providence of God calls a man to the metropolis, we feel that there is a fitness in things — that the energies of a human soul have been summoned into an environment where they will receive full play. But when God calls a man into the wilderness — lays him on a bed of sickness or loads him with a heavy burden, we are startled with a sense of incongruity; we say, “To what purpose is this waste!” We should have said so in Aaron’s case. God says to him, “Go

into the wilderness.” I know not in what form the command came. I should think it took the shape of a moment of physical or mental prostration such as came to Elijah after the excitement of Carmel. If so, Aaron would be an object of general pity; he would be deemed a man whose life was done. His life, in truth, was only beginning; and it was beginning through this seeming loss. When he went out from the world into the wilderness he went right into the arms of his destiny. “Go into the wilderness to meet Moses” was the plan written in heaven. It seems a plan commonplace enough. He had met Moses a thousand times. Moses was his own brother. They had been in constant intercourse; how could this meeting change his destiny? But when we question thus, we forget one thing. A man’s destiny seldom turns on the advent of new circumstances. A thing may happen to us a hundred times, and the hundred-and-first may be a crisis. Saul of Tarsus had seen the sun many times; but the sun at Damascus was one too many for him. Aaron had met Moses often; but the meeting in the wilderness was to reveal each to the other in a new light. The common participation in a desert experience was to knit their hearts together as they had never been knit before.

Reject not thy wilderness moments, O my soul! Reject not the moments when thy spirit is broken! If the alabaster box had been conscious of its brokenness, it would have said with Judas, “To what purpose is this waste!” Yet it had no fragrance till it was broken; the hour of its triumph was the hour of its tragedy; it filled all the house in the act of its impoverishment. So shall it be with thee, O my soul. Never dost thou fill the house of humanity till thou hast had an experience of the wilderness. It is the wilderness that unites thee to thy kind. It is there thou wilt meet, not Moses merely, but all men. Which was more lonely to Jesus — the wilderness of Judea or the marriage-feast of Cana? I say it was Cana. The wilderness had more promise and more facilities as a place of future rendezvous. Cana is not a place which all visit; but the wilderness is. We have all our moments of joy; but we do not all rejoice in the same thing: thy mountain need not be thy brother’s mountain. But thy valley is always thy brother’s valley. We do not all label the same things by the name “Happy”; but we all label the same things by the name “Sad” — death, sickness, pain, bereavement, failure, weariness. Not the crown, but the cross, is thy symbol of union.

There are special roads to gladness; there is a common road to grief. Every man has his own Cana; we have all the same Village-of-Nain. The sunshine may divide us; the night brings us home. We may be lonely in our light; but we have “fellowship in the mystery.” The key into thy brother’s heart is the key that has fallen in the mire; thou shalt meet him in thy wilderness, O my soul.