The Voice Before the Desert

In 2014, a twenty-six-year-old physician named Elena Garza finished her residency at Johns Hopkins and volunteered with Doctors Without Borders. Her attending physician, a woman who had mentored her for three years, pulled her aside at the farewell gathering and said simply, "You are exactly the doctor I hoped you would become."

Two weeks later, Elena was in a makeshift clinic outside Juba, South Sudan, treating cholera patients with dwindling supplies, no running water, and temperatures that cracked 110 degrees. She slept on a cot behind a tarp. She lost patients she might have saved with better equipment. She wrote in her journal that some nights she could not stop shaking.

But she also wrote this: "When everything here tells me I am not enough, I hear Dr. Pemberton's voice. She told me who I am before I came to this place. That is what I hold onto."

This is the pattern of Mark 1. At the Jordan River, the heavens tear open and the voice of the Almighty speaks over Jesus: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased." And then — immediately — the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness. Not after a celebration. Not after a rest. Straight into the wild, among beasts and angels, facing Satan himself.

God did not speak those words despite the coming wilderness. He spoke them because of it. He named His Son before the testing began, so that Jesus carried His identity into the desert like water in a canteen. The Father does the same for every one of His children.