To Spiritual Wildlings: Will You Embrace the Kingdom of God in Troubled Times?

“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed … the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it becomes a tree, and the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” Matthew 13:31-32

There’s something about the wilderness that strips a soul bare. The Celtic saints called it peregrinatio—the holy wandering, the sacred exile. It’s the path of prophets, of the desert fathers, of Anabaptist martyrs who fled into the forests to baptize each other in secret.

It’s the journey of every spiritual wildling who finds themselves standing at the edge of institutions and traditions that no longer fit them like they once did (if they ever did), looking out over the landscape of our Christian faith and knowing they cannot stay where they are but have no map to lead them toward what is next.

My own wilderness began with questions. Why did the Jesus I read about in scripture look nothing like the Christ I kept hearing preached in whitewashed sanctuaries and patriotic pulpits? Why did the church speak of love but refuse to stand against the machinery of oppression? And why, to speak more damningly, did it seem, more often than not, to be complicit in the oppression by act or accounting?

The more I wrestled, the more I found myself outside the gates of the evangelical tradition I was raised in (though yours may be different), wandering in the margins where the wild things grow, where things hunt and are hunted, and from where things sometimes never return.

And yet, it was in the wilderness that I began to understand the Gospel preached by Jesus Christ and the early church—not as a list of doctrines, but as a call to the radical love preached at the Sermon on the Mount, a defiant act of resistance against every force that dehumanizes and destroys.

The Tension of Faithful Resistance in Forgotten Places

The poet Wendell Berry writes, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” To embrace faith at the edges of empire is to live in that tension—to know the weight of injustice and still plant flowers in the ruins of what it has spit out and left behind. It is to hold both lament and hope, to meet the clenched fists of pain and suffering with the open hands of hope and grace.

For those of us raised in cultures of violence and competition–scattering for attention, achievement, and acquisition–this tension is particularly sharp. The world tells us to fight with fists or to flee entirely, but the gospel speaks of a third way—a resistance that does not mirror the violence of empire but does not surrender to it either. The Civil Rights movement knew this truth, as did the early Anabaptists who stood unarmed before the sword, as did the monks and mystics who prayed for peace in a world addicted to war at their doorstep.

The work of justice is not soft.
It is fierce, costly, and demands everything.
But it is also deeply tender.
It is filled with hope made possible only by the Spirit of the one who created it.

To be a spiritual wildling is to be a protector, a Keeper, as we like to say in The Appalachian Order—not with the weapons of empire, but with the strength of love; imagination; and creativity–the kinds of weapons that bind darkness, heal wounds, and build something new in the shell of the old.

Eden on the Edges

The Kingdom of God is a place of paradox, where the last are first, the meek inherit the earth, and peace is forged in the fire of suffering love. It is not a place found in the halls of power, or the hills of fake meritocracies. It is found in the margins, on the twisted edges of what is deemed no longer valuable.

Jesus preached clearly that The Kingdom of God is found among the exiles, laborers, and those cast aside … cast aside by economic systems, yes. But sadly, by the church industrial complex as well at times.

I am reminded of the stories passed down to me of old miners who formed unions in the face of company guns, of mothers who fed striking workers when the money ran out. I am reminded of monks who turned battlefields into gardens, undocumented workers who worked with dignity in the shadows of an empire that refuses to see them.

These are the ones who understand the gospel, because they have lived it–because some of them live it every single day.

The Creator’s Shalom is not a passive peace—it is the wholeness of a world set right. It is a single sunbeam that breaks through the canopy into a shadowed glen.

It begins at the edges, where only wild things can grow, where the ones cast out by tradition and institution find that they are not alone and may be exactly where they need to be at just a time as this.

The Call to Sanctified Wildness

If you find yourself at the edges of faith, take heart—you are in good company. The wilderness is where The Creator has always done His best work, calling forth prophets from the desert, saints from the soil, revolutionaries and judges from the margins.

We are not meant to be tame. The gospel is a wild and untamed thing, a love that cannot be caged by institutions or national borders, a fire that burns through the lies of empire and clears the way for something new.

It does not call us to blind obedience.
It does not call us to be silent in the face of injustice.
It does not call us to co-opt scripture in an effort to support a nation or party.

So let us embrace our identity as spiritual wildlings. Let us wander boldly, love fiercely, plant flowers in the ruins of promised riches. Let us build communities of justice and mercy in the places others have abandoned.

The road ahead is uncertain, but the wild things know the way.
Where there is love, there is home.
Where there is light, there can be no darkness.