Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. (Luke 4:1-2, NIV)
When it comes to golf, I am many things: a player, a viewer, a reader. But when I was young and bored in my high school Spanish class, I was also a pencil-and-paper architect, dreaming up designs that allowed me to insert my own topographical features, rather than those provided by the land a client turned over to my 15-year-old self.
Maybe I should not be surprised to find myself where I often have in recent months: fascinated by the online discussions of architecture nerds like Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg and the PGA Tour’s Zac Blair. Add to this my consumption of The Golf Journal and its articles, photos, and drawings about classic courses and standout holes.
Now I’ll assume you need some bringing up to speed, so here’s the crux of nearly all these discussions: Do we want alleys, or do we want width?
Alleys come at courses like Firestone Country Club and Harbour Town, where trees line the fairways and options surrender to the demand for precision.
Width is found at treeless courses, like the new home of the AT&T Byron Nelson, which is Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore’s design at Trinity Forest. In fact, Crenshaw and Coore are masters of width and choice, providing angles of all kinds, and thus avenues for every golfer to choose their favorite approach.
Sometimes life lays itself open to us like this, with many choices—so many, on occasion, that we can’t quickly decide between all the good things.
If the wilderness is the proving ground for us too, the place we are led by the Holy Spirit, let us pray that we will do as Jesus did.There are times, however, when we have no choice at all, when the circumstances of our days are narrowed like those tunnels of trees on the wooded courses loved only by the straightest hitters. To nearly all of us, this is the wilderness. Whether we’re seeing the forest or the trees, we’re not seeing much of anything else.
I am stunned when I read Luke’s words of the temptation of Christ ahead of our Savior’s public ministry. It was the Spirit—the Holy Spirit—who led Jesus into the wilderness.
Literarily, we often read of the “vast wilderness,” with endless width. In truth, the wilderness, when we are in it, seems utterly confining. We cannot create our own topography; it is placed beneath our feet, to be traversed as someone else’s will: God’s.
Why does the Lord do this to us? Why does he lead us into a wilderness we would never choose for ourselves? In Luke 4, the wilderness was a proving ground, a place where the Father sent a message via the Son to their enduring enemy: He may be in your territory, but he still holds fast to me. Father and Son, one against the evils of the world.
If the wilderness is the proving ground for us too, the place we are led by the Holy Spirit, let us pray that we will do as Jesus did. Let us pray that we will hold fast to the Father, led out again by his hand to whatever place, wide or narrow, he takes us next.
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Jeff Hopper
September 18, 2018
Copyright 2018 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.