Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert - Pink Floyd

"The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron: The Israelites are to camp under their respective banners beside flags of their ancestral houses. They are to camp around the tent of meeting at a distance from it." (Numbers 2.1-2)

One assumes that the desert is a place of solitude. There's nothing more disturbing than being alone with yourself in the wilderness only to hear someone talking just around the bend. Is not the desert a place of community? We not only learn to live there (here) but we learn to live with others in it. One quickly learns that it will take teamwork to survive in this desert. Take the Israelites for instance, camped around some big top tent. I can see their little pup tents all in a row. God's idea of a crop circle made out of people. What did they do when they did not get along? Roll up their tent and move across the street, cross the crick, make camp on the other side of the ravine? Is one to think that Moses (or God for that matter) was going to allow that? Wasn't being outside the camp generally considered a bad thing? Shouldn't camp be a safe place?

But that isn's always the case is it. There can be as much danger and idolatry in camp as there is outside of it. The wanderer insists upon his rights of course, but the desert scoffs at our "rights." The desert insists that it is only by its mercy and grace that you live there in the first place. Yet the wanderer is not listening but worrying over eminent domains, rights to privacy and freedoms of speech and religion. One would think we actually believe the lie, "You will be like God." The camp has become a buffet and "choice" is the main dish, as one sells their soul for a tradition or a trend. Why submit to being community when you can pay someone else to do it for you anyway. Is this not the American way? And so the carcasses dot the landscape as one makes their way to the promise land. When will the pilgrim realize that "sometimes you can't make it on your own" (U2). Sola Fide, WHB