Part of the challenge of God in the wilderness is not to fight the work God is doing in our lives, but to allow ourselves to be held in the wilderness waiting. This is another promise God is making to the Israelites: When you feel stalled in the same place, know that waiting is part of the process. The pillar will move again when the time is right. I am with you in the waiting. Throughout their wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites are led by a pillar of cloud and fire: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people” (Exod. 13:21-22).
I don’t spend a lot of time in my daily life thinking about clouds. The only time I really think about clouds is when I’m in an airplane. Those who know me well know that I don’t fly well. And when I say I don’t fly well, what I mean is, when I sit down in a plane, I’m so nervous that I lose all sense of dignity and self-control. If you sit next to me in a plane, be prepared to hold my hand without giving your consent to do so. I may also invade your personal space in other ways. If you sit next to me in a plane, be prepared for me to ask you to stop what you’re doing, even if what you’re doing is sleeping, to talk me through it. And even if you have the window seat, you need to think about that window as belonging to me, not to you, and I always want my window to be open. If you’re my close friend, expect to get a few text messages from me, like, “I’m boarding at 1:05. Please pray for me. Please pray for whoever sits next to me. And if I don’t make it off this plane alive, know that I love you.” I’m not proud of any of this, by the way. What makes me especially nervous when I fly is being stuck in a cloud. You can’t see inside that cloud. You can’t see how high you’re hovering over the ground. You can’t see the blue sky, which, for me, is a comfort when I’m flying. All you can see is a kind of dizzying, brilliant white. You don’t know when you’ll be out of the cloud—you just know that you’re in it.
In Jewish and Christian tradition, the cloud symbolizes God’s presence and God’s protection. In the 14th century, an anonymous Christian mystic wrote about the “cloud of unknowing.” The cloud of unknowing was, for this writer, the place we enter into to let go of what we think we know of God in order to experience God more fully. For this writer, the cloud was a symbol of God’s abiding presence, his love, and of the fact that God is always mysterious. God is always bigger than we are, hidden in some way, but present, nevertheless. Entering into the cloud meant trusting that God is good, that God is present, and that God is guiding us from one place to the next. Much of that involves waiting and trust. For the Israelites, God was present in the pillar of cloud and fire. The presence of God was there during the day and during the night. Unseen footprints, guiding the way through a pillar of cloud. God is still there when we can’t see out, see through, or find our own footprints let alone his. The cloud is the symbol of the mystery of being led by God. The cloud reminds us that there’s much we cannot perceive; much mystery remains with the way that God guides us. However, that doesn’t mean that there are not footprints guiding us along the way. The psalmist of Psalm 77 speaks of being sort of “stalled” in one place, and he uses the language of the night: “In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying,” he says (Ps. 77:2) “You hold my eyelids open,” he says (Ps. 77:4) and “Please let me remember my song in the night” (Ps. 77:6). He is, like we are sometimes, stalled in the night, stuck, in a particular place. Unable to move on from whatever fear or depression or wilderness place we’re in. The psalmist is stalled there—he can’t seem to get to the day, he’s in a perpetual night with the inability mentally and spiritually to travel anywhere else. It’s a fearful place. Certainly, there would have been fear in the hearts and souls of the Israelites, running from the Egyptians, running towards their freedom, fear of what might happen to them out there in an unfamiliar place at night. But the pillar of fire is a reminder that God is there in the night, too.
When the cloud stops for a while, this is the time to stop and take stock of all that God is doing, to reflect on all that God has done, and to rest assured in God’s presence. God will stop us in a place as long as need be—the wilderness will purify, do its work, and then we move onto the next place, journeying “in stages,” as Genesis and Exodus both remind us.