Image by Daniel Peckham via Flickr
The desert with all it stark and subtle beauty has always fascinated me. I love to watch the high jagged peaks of the backdrop of the Southwestern United States with their shadows of purple, blue and black that flow down into flat valleys below, with that flow always changing depending on the time of the day it is.
I never get tired of driving on the straight seemingly never-ending highways that bisect states like Arizona and New Mexico because although the scenery seems to never change it is always changing always moving.
One minute the colors in the shadows look like bruises marring the landscape, the next like a waterfall of purple, pink and gray running together in a watercolor painting, and the next like a ribbon of color tying itself in and through the very rock itself as if to make itself even more beautiful and appealing to those passing by.
Even in its dry desolation, there is always life somewhere in the desert, whether that life be a spider that has dug itself deeply in its lair in the ground, a lizard that hastily darts from one shadow to another or even the cactus that seems to survive on the leftover moisture contained in the arid ground it burrows its roots deeply into.
But, once a year when the rains come, the desert turns into something else. It blooms and blossoms into a multi-colored carpet of flowers and plant life that you would never think existed if you saw it any other time of the year. The water, like a long-awaited miracle, falls from the sky and everything below reacts, drinking it in and quickly using it to turn into something that it always has the potential to become.
It becomes a beautiful garden blooming in the most unlikely of places, which is really how we, who belong to the Lord, are as we make our way living in this world.
We live in a dry and desolate place, a place that is full of distractions and movement to gain our attention, but has no water or sustenance for us. It’s not until the miracle of the rain that only He can provide falls down on us that we truly become what He has given us the potential to be, a beautiful multi-hued garden that can only grow when it is fed and watered by the Lord Himself.
“God, You are my God; I eagerly seek You. I thirst for You; my body faints for You in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water. So I gaze on You in the sanctuary to see Your strength and Your glory.”
Psalm 63:1-2
