Wilderness as Threat
When ecologists, environmentalists, gardeners and nature lovers are getting all sentimental about wild places it is important to remember that for many people (possibly for all of us at times), wilderness suggests threat and danger. Wolves do not regularly lie down with lambs. Not everyone can eat and be satisfied. Water shortages can turn up in the most surprising places.
At such times, many people, like the Children of Israel, see it as an adequate reason for rejecting God altogether and turning to other things. Even the faithful ask ‘why’ and do not always come up with an answer.
Just what happened in this incident is shrouded in mystery, but clearly the water was never far away and there was no real threat to life or limb. The problem lies not so much in the wilderness, but in people suffering from a mixture of impatience and a lack of trust, while the solutions come from one who is prepared to hope against hope, to trust when all else fails and at the time to explore even the most unprepossessing places and methods to achieve what is needed.
The story also introduces us to another facet of the God of the wilderness — his commitment to his people and his capacity to care for them in every way. He is not one to lead his people up a gum tree, to inflict unnecessary hardship, or to neglect them at their point of greatest need, but some circumstances call for patient waiting. This is the case even when we walk in pleasanter places. It is hardest when life is toughest.
Instead of complaining therefore we might reassure ourselves by spotting the manifold ways in which nature shows herself to be a good mother. Muir reminds us how she ‘sees well to the clothing of her many bairns’, citing birds with feathers, beetles with shining jackets and bears with shaggy furs, thinly clad animals for the tropics and warmly clothed animals for the arctic, the squirrel with socks and mittens and a tail broad enough for a blanket, not to mention the mole ‘living always in the dark and in the dirt, yet as clean as the otter.’