Perhaps you, too, have dusted your heels through such sands. Perchance you, too, have been reluctant to tell about it. After all, it strikes hard at our image of success and merry-making. Nevertheless, perhaps part of the feasting eventually at God's table is to open up, to tell what the suffering has been about that has brought us to such a table. Consequently, in being human with you, I tell you the truth. I was betrayed. I was hurt deeply. I was struck with a heavy hammer of confusion as to the whereabouts of God Himself.

I recall telling a close friend about this before "going public." He looked at me with dismay. Immediately I knew that he was wondering how it was that I could have experienced all this. Then I knew that the profile I had usually shown to the world -- my friends -- was one of many pals, lots of laughs and few aches.

He opened his mouth, not to say anything, but to gape at me. "Does it sound strange?" I asked, about as surprised at his questioning as he was at my telling. After all, I had lived the outside me and the inside me. And for most of the time, I had thought that my close friends knew the inside me as well as the outside me. But it was dawning on me now that the inside me had been kept quite inside at that.

So it was that I started to laugh at him, then with him, as he got the message without me having to say anything. Our minds meshed as in a moment and we responded with relief at the discovery. I had confessed then and there to being vulnerable to betrayal just as every other mortal. And with that he knew that he himself was not alone in his own experiences of such betrayals. For the first time in our relationship we were now sharing common hurts of being turned on by persons we had thought to be friends. What a warmth surged through us in such a binding not known before between the two of us.

Therefore, I share with you this morning my feelings about the desert sands knowing that these are those who are listening who have walk-those same miles. Is it comforting to hear someone else tell you of the pain?

But more. I tell you also of your banquetings. If you have thought God left you, not trusting all that surely, then welcome. If you have dealt with blisters of the heart, believing some of them inflicted by the loving Father Himself, then welcome. If you have faced up to that awful loneliness of soul that comes when reaching out to touch Someone, only to feel that He has gone on sabbatical, then welcome.

After all, you did not go away. Death did not come to you. Disease did not comsume your frame. And life went on, with you tagging along, liking it or not.

In it all, interestingly enough, was God. At first He wore a mask, which is His privilege since He is the author of humor and complexities of appearance. At first, he spoke in silence, which is also His right since He brings into being not only the clatter but also the quiet of the universe. At first, He stayed aloof, which again is His prerogative because of His being everywhere which allows for seeming nowhere.