5 min read
Streams in the Desert
“I will make rivers in the desert” — comfort gathered in a season of grief, for fellow travelers in the dry country.
“I will make rivers in the desert.”
I gathered these pages in a desert of my own. While my husband lay ill and did not recover, I collected whatever could carry me through a day — a verse, a hymn, a line from some old saint who had walked this ground before me. I offer them to you now, fellow traveler, from inside the dry country, and not from a safe distance.
Here is the promise on which everything else rests: I will make rivers in the desert. Mark it well. God does not promise to keep you out of the wilderness. He promises to put water in it.
That is a harder comfort than the one we want, and a better one. We would have the desert cancelled; I asked for that myself, and was not answered. What I found instead is that the stream comes while you are still in the dry place — and that you would never have noticed it anywhere else. In a green land, water is scenery. In the desert, it is life itself.
In a green land, water is scenery. In the desert, it is life itself.
The flowers that yield the sweetest perfume are the ones that have been crushed, and the finest music is drawn from strings stretched tight. I do not say the crushing is good; let no one tell you that. I say only that God works within the sorrow and not merely after it, and that His choicest consolations are reserved for the very ground we would have called wasted.
Are you in a dry season — a grief that will not lift, a prayer unanswered so long you have stopped saying it aloud? I will not tell you to cheer up. I will tell you to watch the ground. Look for the small water: the friend who called at the right hour, strength for one more day, the sleep that finally came, the strange unearned moment of peace in the middle of a hard afternoon.
Name these as gifts, and not coincidences. The naming is the whole of the practice — and it is how a desert slowly reveals that it has had a stream running through it all along.