Dispatch from the Desert

You know how when you're playing in the ocean, you often find yourself somehow half a mile down from where you started, even though you didn't think you were actually moving?  The current is an invisible, imperceptible, yet incredibly powerful force.

Pick any timeframe: last three months, last year, last two years.  As I look back on each timeframe, I feel as if I am presently a notable distance away from where I started.  I didn't notice the movement until now, but a spiritual current has been pushing me to a totally different place.

This place looks different. It feels different. Life is just different now.  I think the messages from retreat snapped me out of oblivion and helped me to realize where I am.  I am in the desert.  And for once, I don't hate it.  In fact, I've begun to cultivate a cactus garden.  I've taken to studying the sand, stars, and skies with all this wide open space.  And finally, post-retreat, I've decided to pitch a tent.  I'm staying here until God calls me out, and until He calls me out, I'm going to make this desert my home.

The Cactus Garden

It seems God has ushered in a new season of growth in relationships.  

Over the last several years, as I gradually learned to let go of my law school fellowship and build new ties at my local church, I've relished deepening relationships with women at my church.  The women are a very special bunch:  talented, interesting, deep, complex, and loving.  And talkative! I like talkative.  They are also good listeners, and they want to grow in Jesus, as do I.  I am encouraged by their stories, and I am challenged by their trials. It's been a gift to go deeper with these women and journey together, and grow together.  

An unexpected addition to this cactus garden are a couple other relationships with folks who are seeking truth, but haven't quite gotten there yet.  I've never really struggled with the messages or status of the Bible as God's Word all that much (some yes, but not significantly so), but I have a couple friends for whom this is a barrier to faith.  I'm not really sure what to do, but I've taken to exploring their questions with them, if only so they can have a friend along the way...and so I can keep an eye and a prayer on them in the meantime.  It's good.  Tough for me, because I just don't have the same struggles.  But I believe God has called me to this, and that makes it really good.

The Study of Sand, Stars, and Sky

I've always been a reader.  Growing up, I loved the Amelia Bedelia, Boxcar Children series, the Babysitters Club, all books by Lurlene McDaniel (morbid, I know), Beverly Cleary, Fudge and Tootsie, the Piggle-Wiggle books, and Frog and Toad.  In college, I read almost every single fiction book available in the HCW library.  In law school, pleasure reading took a dive because we were reading 4000 pages per semester anyway.  But when I emerged from law school, I picked up the self-dubbed genre of "fascinating non-fiction" and have been addicted to it ever since.  Need a book recommendation about Somali pirates? What it's like to be kidnapped by the FARC?  The smuggling of Chinese people into the US?  The drug trade? North Korea?  Life behind a burqa?  I'm your go-to person.

Except...not for the moment.  

These days, I'm in the middle of reading two books:  Tim Keller's "Every Good Endeavor" and Bonhoeffer's "The Cost of Discipleship."  Plus the Bible-in-a-year plan that our women's group is doing (currently in Job and Acts).  I really miss reading my fascinating non-fiction. But there's no time for it right now.  I'm too busy reading all this other stuff that is enriching my faith, telling me things I need to hear in this moment in time.  Again, it's good.  Studying the God who put me in the desert, studying things that He seems to want to share with me.  I have all this space in terms of time and focus and energy.  This is what He has called me to do with it.  So I'm studying...and it's good.

The Tent

I'd been resisting this.  I'd been plotting my way out (although really, that seems foolish now that I think about it...even when we think we are in control, we aren't).  I'd been dreaming up ways to draw or find a map, chart a course, and free myself.

No longer.

I'm staying here.  I realize that I'm supposed to be here.  This is part of the plan, and it is part of a good plan. It has a purpose, I don't want to thwart that purpose.  So...I'm pitching a tent, getting comfortable, learning to make a life out of this place.  And in this, I think I am finally--finally--learning to be still and really know that He is God.