This Lent, I’ve been reflecting on the Gospel stories where God encounters people in wilderness places—those in-between spaces where something new has not yet fully emerged. As I consider both my own wilderness seasons and the one the church seems to be navigating, I’m trying to resist the instinct to hurry toward answers. Instead, I’m wondering what it means to stay in that space of discomfort and uncertainty, attentive to what God might be shaping that I cannot yet see.
Several of the Gospel stories appointed for this season unfold in these kinds of in-between places. In the wilderness, Jesus resists the voice that tries to redefine him. In the night, Nicodemus brings his questions and hears that God’s love cannot be earned. At the well, a Samaritan woman tells her story and discovers her voice again.
Each of these encounters happens in an in-between place—the wilderness, the darkness, the edge of a village well.
Threshold spaces.
A threshold is the place between what was and what comes next. It is the doorway we cross when something is changing, even if we cannot yet see what the change will bring.
In these Gospel stories, transformation does not happen after the threshold is crossed. It happens within it.
Jesus faces the wilderness before his ministry begins. In that barren place, the voices of temptation try to reshape his identity—inviting him to prove himself, to grasp power, to define his calling in ways that seem convincing but are ultimately hollow. Instead, he remains rooted in who God has already declared him to be.
Nicodemus comes under cover of darkness, carrying honest questions about faith and truth. He wants clarity, certainty, answers that can be neatly understood. Instead, Jesus speaks of being born from above, of the Spirit moving like wind—mysterious, untamed, impossible to control.
And at the well, a woman arrives in the middle of the day, perhaps hoping to avoid the eyes and judgments of others. Yet in that unexpected conversation with Jesus, she finds her voice again. Her story becomes testimony.
Wilderness.
Darkness.
A quiet well at the edge of town.
None of these places look like the beginning of transformation. And yet that is where it happens.
There is a moment at every threshold when our instinct is to rush through.
To solve the question.
To quiet the uncertainty.
To get somewhere clearer.
We want the resolution. The answer. The next step.
But the stories of this season suggest something different.
Transformation often begins when we stay in the space between what was and what will be.
When we allow the wilderness to reveal what is true.
When we let the questions linger in the night.
When we dare to speak our stories out loud.
Thresholds are not only places we pass through.
Sometimes they are places we must dwell.
Because if we can linger in the threshold long enough, we may begin to notice something subtle happening around us.
The light shifts.
The air changes.
A new way forward slowly comes into view.
And we realize that even here—in the in-between—
God has already been at work.