When God Leads You Off the Main Road
When God Leads You Off the Main Road
What if the hardest seasons of your life aren’t detours at all? In Matthew’s Gospel, the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness — not away from God, but toward deeper trust.
When I was a hospice chaplain, the tool I relied on most wasn’t a Bible. It was a GPS. Back in 2008, I owned one of those glorious TomTom devices. Finding someone’s house deep in the rural corners of the upstate without unfolding a giant paper map felt like wizardry. Eventually the TomTom gave way to Apple Maps and Google Maps, but the experience hasn’t changed. You’re following the route with total confidence… and suddenly you hit a detour. The road is closed. Familiar landmarks disappear. Now you’re creeping down a dusty side street wondering what just happened. And the first thought is always: I must have messed up. I took a wrong turn. How do I get back to the main road? If you’re anything like me, you might even argue with the phone. I have absolutely accused mine of trying to get me lost.
We assume leaving the main road means we failed. We treat our spiritual lives the exact same way. When life is smooth — relationships steady, health good, work manageable, prayer alive — we assume we’re cruising down the center of God’s will. But the moment we hit dryness, isolation, exhaustion, or deep testing, we assume God must be angry, that we must have done something wrong, that we need to get out of here. Then the Gospel disrupts that thinking.
Matthew tells us that immediately after Jesus’ baptism — after the heavens open and the Father declares, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” — something surprising happens: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” He didn’t wander there. He didn’t fall out of favor. He wasn’t abandoned. He was led. The wilderness is not a glitch. It is a feature.
We tend to treat wilderness seasons like bugs in the code of our lives. Scripture treats them like features. After rescuing Israel from slavery, God does not drop them straight into the Promised Land. They spend forty years in the wilderness. There they learn trust. There they receive manna — daily bread they cannot store or control. There they discover who they are. Jesus steps into that same story. Forty days in the wilderness mirror Israel’s forty years. Where Israel faltered, Jesus stands firm. But to do so, he must be stripped of every comfort: no crowds, no noise, no food, only heat, hunger, and silence.
God often uses the wilderness to remove the noise that drowns out our souls. We live surrounded by distraction. The moment we feel boredom or anxiety, we reach for a screen. When we feel emptiness, we fill it instantly. We rarely sit long enough to feel our spiritual hunger. In the wilderness, the distractions disappear, and we discover what we are actually relying on to survive.
After forty days of fasting, the tempter arrives: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” It is a clever temptation because it targets a legitimate need. Jesus is hungry. But the offer is a shortcut: take control, provide for yourself, prove who you are. Notice where the attack begins: identity. “If you are the Son of God…” The Father has already declared Jesus beloved. The tempter tries to make him prove it.
Jesus responds with words from Deuteronomy: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The devil thought the wilderness was where Jesus was weakest. He misunderstood. The wilderness was where Jesus was most fiercely connected to the Father. Hunger did not weaken him. It clarified him.
There is deep comfort here for anyone walking through a wasteland right now. Your wilderness might be a diagnosis you never expected. It might be loneliness in a crowded room. It might be a season when prayer feels dry and distant. It might be exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. The lie whispered in that dry place is the same one whispered to Jesus: God has abandoned you. If you were truly loved, you wouldn’t be here. Take control.
But Matthew tells us something different: the Spirit is with you in the dust. You are not being punished. You are being prepared.
This is what Lent is about. For forty days, the Church invites us to step into the wilderness intentionally. Unfortunately, Lent often gets reduced to a religious diet. We give something up and count the days until Easter. If that’s all it is, we’ve missed the point. Jesus entered the wilderness already beloved. Lent is not about proving devotion. It is about removing the noise that keeps us from hearing God.
Our culture trains us to avoid discomfort. The second we feel bored, we grab a screen. The second we feel anxious, we distract ourselves. The second relationships become difficult, we look for exits. We keep taking shortcuts to avoid the ache of being human. Lent invites us to stop running, to turn off the GPS that keeps rerouting us back to what is easy, and to step into the quiet.
When we give something up, we create space. We allow ourselves to feel hunger — physical or spiritual. And when the urge comes to fill that space with a quick fix, we learn to say: I do not live by bread alone. I need a word from the mouth of God. We do not enter Lent to suffer. We enter it to hear again.
The wilderness rarely feels holy when you are in it. Only later do we recognize the ground where God was shaping us. So if life feels like a detour right now, resist the urge to panic. You may not be lost. You may be being led. And the ground beneath your feet — dry, unfamiliar, uncomfortable — may be the very place where God is preparing you for joy.
If this season feels like unfamiliar terrain, you are not alone. The path may be dusty and uncertain, but it is often there — off the main road — that clarity, courage, and grace begin to grow.
