The Last Ship Back to Berlin

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood on the deck of a steamship crossing the Atlantic, heading back toward everything he had just escaped. Friends in New York had arranged a safe teaching position for him, a way out of Hitler's Germany. He had barely unpacked his suitcase before he knew he had made a terrible mistake. "I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany," he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr. "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

The ship carried him straight into his wilderness. For the next six years, Bonhoeffer faced interrogation, surveillance, the daily temptation to compromise his convictions, and finally imprisonment in Flossenburg concentration camp. He could have stayed safe in Manhattan. Instead, he chose the harder obedience.

Mark tells us that immediately after the heavens tore open and the Father declared Jesus His beloved Son, the Spirit drove Him into the desert to face Satan among the wild animals. There was no gap between the blessing and the trial. The voice that affirmed Him was the same voice that sent Him into the wasteland.

God's calling rarely leads first to comfort. Sometimes the clearest sign that the Almighty has spoken your name is the wilderness that opens before you the very next morning — and the strange, stubborn grace that makes you walk straight into it.