In the middle of the summer, plants need to be watered regularly. Whether from the sky or from our rain barrel, the plants in our yard always seem to thrive after good, regular watering. They turn a vibrant green, they perk up, and they have new life.
Every so often, we get stuck in a desert and we go through a period of drought in our spiritual lives. It’s important to remember that whenever we are going through a desert in our spiritual lives, we are not deserted. Just the opposite is true. It is also important to remember that whenever we are going through a desert in our spiritual lives, we must seek out water.
Deserts are mentioned many times throughout Scripture, and of particular interest is that one of the Hebrew words for desert in the Bible is midbar, which means pasture ground. Pasture ground is where animals go to graze, to eat grasses and other low-growing vegetation. Midbar, a pasture ground, a wilderness. Far from being barren land, deserts present us with an opportunity to graze and eat. What a difference this understanding would have made in the lives of the children of Israel! Instead of wandering for forty years, if we look to the Lord to learn in our spiritual wilderness, we can gain wisdom.
During the hottest summer days, the plants in our garden absorb every bit of water they can get. When we go through a spiritual desert or a dry spell, it seems as though we really have to seek out that water. “The Lord is my shepherd,” David wrote in Psalm 23:1. Our Lord is not careless, putting us out to pasture and forgetting about us; when He allows us to be in the midbar, we are not there alone. He is there with us, and we need to look to Him. Rather than get discouraged by our deserts, we should remember that they are pasture ground, a place where we can be fed.
The desert can be a place of great promise. Consider God’s promise of mercy to restore Israel in Isaiah 35: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose… Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.” (1, 6). In the driest of gardens, water will run through the cracks before being absorbed by the earth. Even on our driest desert days, God can make our parched ground a pool.
The question is, are we seeking His wisdom in the desert, spending time daily searching His Word, or are we wandering aimlessly, spending our energy complaining and contemplating about how thirsty we are? Oswald Chambers wrote that “Wherever the providence of God may dump us down, in a slum, in a shop, in the desert, we have to labour along the line of His direction.” We would do well to follow after Jesus’s lead. He sought quiet and rest in the desert. “Come ye yourselves into a desert place, and rest a while:” He gives the invitation in Mark 6:31. Rather than a place of fretting, our desert seasons can become times of focus on God, because Jesus Himself calls us to rest.
To find our way out of the spiritual desert, we must look to the Great Shepherd. “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:19).
