Getting Unlost: The Desolation of Brokenness

When visiting a friend back home, I took a wrong turn and ended up two hours deep into the backroads along the water. At first, I was fine with the adventure, entering and exiting dark streets surrounded by forest, the clouds blotting out the stars that studded the night sky. But about 45 minutes after I lost phone reception, and getting more lost every time I turned around, I began to get uneasy. There were no houses in sight, and the few gas-stations that marked civilization every 20 miles or so, were slapped up against the outskirts of barely visible towns, doors locked and windows darkened for the night.

This road has to lead somewhere, I kept thinking, but as C.S. Lewis pointed out, somewhere is a precariously ambiguous word, and it all depends on what you mean by it. The road kept leading to somewhere, if that meant it kept getting to “more and more trees, all dark and dripping, and to colder and colder air. And strange, icy winds (that) kept blowing the mist past…though they never blew it away.” But apparently, if I wanted to get somewhere I actually knew, I should have been more specific.

A few hours into my late-night adventure, I came upon a bayside market with an old woman just locking up for the night. I got out of my car and hailed her from a distance, shivering in the cold. “I need to get to the freeway. Can you please point me in the right direction?”

She looked at me with surprise and sympathy, beginning with: “First my poor dear, you need to get yourself a warmer jacket—for heaven’s sake!” She pointed out the way to go, about 30 miles to the west along the water. “You will keep thinking you’re going too far, and you will want to turn. But don’t. Stay on the path, and if you follow it all the way to the end keeping the water on your right, you will be just fine. Whatever you do, don’t trust your desire to turn. Just keep going.”

So I did, following the water, and keeping my cool (I am usually quite the expert at getting myself unlost, as I’ve needed to sharpen that skill often). Sure enough, the road led me exactly where I needed to go, and with the burst of sudden familiarity, came a new surge of confidence and relief. I was still a long way from home, but I knew where I was now and how I needed to get there. And that was all that mattered.

Lostness and Foundness

Throughout my life, I have needed to navigate lostness in more than just the physical sense. This last year, lostness has emphasized itself in more ways than I had ever expected, and at times it was hard to discern the real from the unreal, the truth from the lie of victimhood, the hard reality of hope from the equally real—though false—feeling of despair.

Finding your way back to what you know, whether navigating a midnight drive, the throws of grief, a broken relationship, or a storm of memories and nightmares, requires at least three things: enough courage to match the fear, enough persistence to match the helplessness, and enough awareness to know where you are (as in spatial identity), even when you don’t know where you are (as in location). While lost, you will often feel alone, or feel the frustration of passing the same thing again and again, sometimes right at the moment you think you are making progress. Above all, you may feel there is no way out, no way back, and you may want to give up. But you know you can’t. You must not trust your desire to turn aside, but follow the road to the end. To feel lost is inevitable, but you must not live there. Lostness is no place to stop in.

Desolation and Consolation

Recently, I’ve been listening to a podcast hosted by Jonathan Rogers through The Rabbit Room, called The Habit. In the podcast, Rogers interviews writers to get insight into their technique, creative process, and the intersection of stories, writing, and life. In one episode, he interviewed songwriter Drew Miller on his new album, Desolation and Consolation.

Neither of these words are in our everyday vocabulary, yet they are filled with layers of meaning. Desolation, Miller explains, has become synonymous with sad in our usage today, yet that is not what it means. Desolation means absence. To desolate something means to abandon it. It refers to a place that should be full, inhabited, developed, flourishing, but is now empty; a shell of what it used to be, for its life is gone. Miller writes: “While many negative emotions accompany a word like desolation, the most haunting part to me is that the word itself is indifferent to them. It doesn’t mean ‘sad,’ ‘lonely’, or ‘despairing’—it simply means empty. Nothing. Absence.”

In contrast to desolation is consolation. While desolation speaks of a previous life and presence that has fled, consolation speaks of a prior absence that is now filled. And just as desolation comes from the verb to desolate, consolation comes from the verb to console. Miller adds: “Those who have never known loss or grief have no need to be consoled. It’s only from a previous emptiness that we hunger and thirst to be filled.”

The Defiance of Hope

These two ideas, lostness and foundness, desolation and consolation, are common to each other, each woven into the fabric of life and existence in a broken world, pointing to something not yet present, but no less true.

This world is a desolation of brokenness, an unutterable devastation that bears down daily upon us, crying out that there used to be something here that is here no longer. Each of our hearts beat in a ghost town, in the wasteland under the dragon’s mount, in the wreckage from the storm that strikes again and again. Within desolation, it is easy for our hearts themselves to become desolate, for the experience of utter emptiness to lead us astray, to feel the lostness arrest our aching souls again and again.

Yet desolation is not just an absence, it is an absence of what was once there. And that is beautiful because in God’s story, that means desolation is a promise of what will be restored. It is a promise of consolation.

“We must honor both,” Miller writes, “because in each we receive the liberating truth of our need.”

Consolation is more than the stiffened hug or the stoic platitude; it is not comfort, which can be temporary, superficial, or meaningless; it is not meant to be plastered on as a bandaid to our aching hearts that cry out for hope and realization. It is fierce, quiet, and relentless. It arrives with defiance, with a sword. It gazes up at the ash and clouds that hide the dragon, buries its feet into the barren land, and says, “Yes, this too is mine.”

Hope is the four-letter word of the Christian. The one we say with defiance in the face of a world that cries against it, that berates, that shudders. In the midst of the silence, we cry Hope, and raise our banner of consolation.

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,” the Psalmist says. Consolation doesn’t wait. It pursues. We are the ones who wait for consolation.

Dear Christian, we are not so lost as we thought. Follow the road and do not turn aside. Home is at the end.

We must only trust that the story isn’t over.