Words pregnant with implication in Scripure often are often flattened. Growing up I often heard Mark 1 referenced as a prescription for a “Quiet Time.” Some modern tranlsations aided this move by translating “desolate, wilderness, desert” with “quiet” or “solitary.” No doubt an interpretive move. But in a world where there was little good news – literally no word about rescue – Jesus takes up John’s announcement of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. It may be good to track the word wilderness in his Hebrew context – the place of no word or no speaking. Jesus gets up to go to a desolate place where this is no word or speaking. Desolate hardly translates simply quiet or solitary. There seems to be so much more.