This Beautiful Desert

“I feel so untethered and ungrounded,” I told a trusted friend. “None of the things I’ve counted on seem certain anymore. The only thing I’m still sure of is God.” He didn’t shrink back or fall away in a dead faint. My confession didn’t rock his world one bit. He just nodded knowingly and said, “That’s good enough.” And he was right.

This isn’t a season of plenty. My barns are not full, and I am certainly not thinking of building new ones. My surest comforts aren’t so comforting anymore, and my sweetest dreams seem silly when I name them—so I don’t. But even in this desert, even in this odd, unsettling wilderness, my God keeps coming at me, relentless in his love.

He keeps turning up: in an unexpected bouquet of tulips and daisies left with a handmade card on my doorstep. In a friend’s well-timed e-mail, brimming with love. In the first pink rose on the hedge out back, defying any frost to set spring back another hour. In a long-distance prayer, spoken as I held the phone to my ear and wept. In the exquisite sliver of moon that hung low enough on the horizon on a recent night that I almost reached for it.

How can I be sure it’s him? Who else makes the desert bloom? Who else causes rivers to run in dry places and the wilderness to bear fruit? I am not sure about tomorrow. I am not even sure about this afternoon. I am not sure that “the check is in the mail” or that dreams will come true or that happily ever after even exists. What I am sure about is this: he can make joy out of almost nothing. “Joy,” says Stanley Hauerwas, “is the disposition that comes from our realization that we can trust in surprises for the sustaining of our lives.”^a

He still surprises me. I believe he always will.

“Indeed, the LORD will comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places. And her wilderness He will make like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and sound of a melody.”

Isaiah 51:3, NASB

^a Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).

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