The Back Forty
Domesticated into fear and scarcity, Lent is our opportunity to recondition our hearts for the wild.
When I was a struggling high school football player, 2*@$ish year ago, nothing ran terror down my spine like summer conditioning. I was asthmatic, chubby, in a pretty consistent state of hypervigilance, and much happier at musical practice. But football was what you did, and if you wanted to prove your commitment, you showed up for summer sessions.
As a lineman in training, built to make piles of young men all within a five-yard radius, I intellectually didn’t understand the value of me improving my hundred-yard dash. Summer conditioning was loosely supervised; team captains were supposed to set the tone. The tone was usually jocular with a side of bullying. As much as it trained my body, it shaped my beliefs about conditioning: it is a cocktail of fear, intimidation, and near-guaranteed failure.
Reconditioned
As an adult, I’ve had to have a re-education on conditioning. What I know now is that it is embedded in everyday life. We are “conditioned” by everything that happens to us, trained into a sense of what normal is, and our adaptive brains conform to whatever reality we meet to that definition of normal. If you grew up in a house where meals were cooked from scratch daily, eating out feels weird. If a “Protestant work ethic" surrounded you, your moral code prioritizes effort, probably making you less than forgiving of those who value leisure, rest, and joy. If you grew up under the hand of violence and threat, your brain—terrifyingly—may have little space for receiving compassion, care, and love.
The American Way of Life is its own form of conditioning. Shaped by that same Protestant work ethic, capitalistic obsessions with money, the colonial impulse to conquer and expand, and a nation of immigrants’ never-ending search for safety. Our cultural wiring codes us to not be “here." We are all only a few generations away from migrants who were running from something for something, and that running plagues us still. This American Way conditions for unsettledness, scarcity thinking, and unfamiliarity with rest.
Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter, cries out to us, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” We are invited into a reconditioning, to enter a different space, with different assumptions, to allow our brain and heart to adhere to a different kind of normal.
The number 40 in the Bible is dripping with significance. It represents not a test, but a space for reforming our minds and hearts, cleansing one way of life for another. This cleansing may be a kind of a trial or even a punishment, but it doesn't have to be. 40 is the wilderness time, resetting the soul into a more accurate view of reality.
Over the next 40 days, we'll take a look at some of these examples, but I wanted to stop today and frame up their essential character. I want to awaken us to the freedom available in the wildlands beyond our enculturated assumptions. I want to draw us into a world that upends our bias for unsettledness, scarcity thinking, and rejection of rest. I need this so badly, and maybe you do, too. We need to recondition ourselves to the wildness of faith, it's unrecoverable richness, it's unwillingness to be tamed.
Untamed
In agrarian terms, the wild end of a farmer's allotment of land was called the Back Forty. For many pre-industrial farmers, the Back Forty was kept free of modern intrusions, a place of untamed nature. In Lent, we are being drawn to that open space, an ecosystem that is more like our home than the socially constructed ones we live in every other day.
Jesus loved the Back Forty wilderness; it was his preferred place to pray. If you grew up evangelical like me, you learned to believe that Jesus went to a "quiet" or "solitary" place to pray, and this was a model for your daily quiet time expectations. The NIV translators have done us no favors here. The word used to imply quiet time is the same word for the place Jesus wrestled with the Satan, facing down His deeper identity, validating His calling, establishing His in the Father's Love. The wildlands conditioned Jesus' faith, and to them, He returned as often as possible to reset Himself to the uncivilized world.
We are meant to live with unfettered rest in the Back Forty. Our hearts—formed by convention, harm, and domestication—are every day pulling us out into the wild. Lent is our time to give them permission. Let's run out in the unmowed pasture. Climb the untrimmed trees. Breath the unpolluted air. Awaken to a faith that knows no boundaries.
The sun is setting soon here over the wildlands in my back yard. I'll meet you there.
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