“I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.”

-Isaiah 43:19

Four years ago, my graduate school counseling supervisor handed me a small, flower-shaped succulent.

“For you,” she said, “because you, too, have learned to thrive in desert places.”

To prepare me for the work of holding other people’s stories, we had spent the year exploring my own story—including my earliest childhood relationships up to the present time, when I was in the process of separating from my first husband. She knew the pain I was in over the death of my marriage, yet her simple gift of a succulent spoke life to me—life that was capable of thriving in the harshest conditions.

Two years after that, my workplace counseling supervisor left a tiny cactus with a prickly, brilliant fuchsia bulb on top of it on my desk.

“It’s weird and wonderful,” her note read, “just like you.”

She, too, had compassionately held my story. My counseling team had laughed and cried together, sharing frustrations and victories, cementing true bonds of friendship that exist to this day. In the midst of my newfound community, I was becoming whole again—learning to re-claim the parts of myself that had been lost in the harsh desert of trauma. Despite the number of times I’ve pricked myself, that bright desert cactus still reminds me that it is possible for beauty to come from pain. 

In February of 2020, Drew walked through our front door and presented me with a Christmas cactus—a spidery-armed plant with dreamy fuchsia flowers on its tips that bloom each year around Christmas time.

“To cheer you up,” he said.

I had been lying on the couch for a week due to a mysterious illness (3 guesses as to what that could’ve been), and he knew that a new plant would lift my spirits. I had never seen anything like it—a cactus that blooms during the darkest, coldest months of the year? How is that even possible? Yet that magical plant has been with me for three winters, and each time its flowers light up the dreary grey with rich bursts of color, often when I need hope to blossom most.

Although I have many other house plants, these desert-blooming plants are most precious to me because they represent the promise of new life in a barren wilderness. They are pictures of an impossible possibility, of something growing from nothing. My waxy rose-shaped succulent and fuchsia-blooming cacti brought hope to me in the midst of my own desert season; when I marvel at their beauty, I am reminded of the number of times throughout Scripture that God meets and transforms his people in the desert.

I think of Hagar fleeing into the desert with her son, only to meet the compassionate “God Who Sees Me.” I remember Moses escaping from his past in Egypt and meeting God in a burning desert bush. Then there’s Elijah, who ran for his life into the wilderness to escape an evil king and queen. In that wilderness place of terror and despair, God sent ravens to bring him food, angels to make him bread, and a “still small voice” which gave Elijah the courage he needed to return home and face his oppressors. In the desert, God met each of those people unexpectedly and at their lowest moments.

*

Often when we find ourselves in a spiritual or emotional desert, we are in pain. It is a season of prolonged suffering, confusion, or doubt. If you are like me, then you’ve also begged to be released from that desert into a more fruitful, abundant, and restful space.

But the stories of God meeting his children in the wilderness show me that the desert is not something to avoid at all costs; instead, it can be a hard yet holy space in which we encounter the Divine. In the impossible desperation of the desert, we meet the God of possibility in ways we might have missed if lulled by the comfort of safety and predictability.

This week, I was struck by a passage in Isaiah in which God uses desert imagery to describe the promised rescue and redemption of his people:

The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
(Isaiah 35:1-2)

A few chapters later, similar redemption-in-the-wilderness themes are repeated when Isaiah hears a voice calling out:

“In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.”
(Isaiah 40:3-4) 

Though God is speaking to Isaiah about the Israelites in exile, the redemption he promises is much, much bigger than for one group of people at a specific time in history. It is the redemption of all things—past, present, and future—inaugurated by the arrival of his son, Jesus.

Around 500 years later, John the Baptist fulfills this prophecy from Isaiah 40 when he announces the good news of the coming Messiah in the desert. The Gospel of Mark begins,

This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. It began just as the prophet Isaiah had written:

“Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, and he will prepare your way.
He is a voice shouting in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord’s coming! Clear the road for him!’”

And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
(Mark 1:1-4)

After Jesus comes to John to be baptized, the very first thing he does is head into the desert, which serves as a painful yet crucial time of preparation for his earthly ministry. At the end of his 40 days in the desert, angels come and tend to Jesus, echoing the desert experience of Elijah.

From Hagar to Jesus, the seemingly lifeless desert is where God transforms the lives of his children. Could the same be true for us?

Could the desert you are in now also be the landscape of your redemption?
Could the God who breathes life into dry bones breathe life into you, too?

What if our desert seasons are not punishments to fear, but invitations to surrender to the transformative presence of God?

It is much easier for me to remain open and curious about the desert seasons of life when I am not in the midst of them. They hurt—I know. It often feels like there is no way out, that we have been forgotten, abandoned, and left to die.

But when I look back at the harshest experiences of my life, I see glimmers of how God prepared me to receive more of Him than I ever thought possible. Instead of bringing me out of the desert the moment I demanded to be rescued, he prepared a way in the wilderness for me that lead straight to his heart.

Beloved of God, know this: Your desert season will end.

Whether it is in this life or the next, I cannot say; but I do pray for each and every one of us that no matter what happens, we will cling to the God Who Sees, trusting Him to bring streams in the wasteland, flowers from dry ground—even life from death.

And now a blessing for you—for us—for deserts past, present, and future:

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died.

-John O’Donohue, “For the Time of Necessary Decision”

 Let it be so.