Drink, Thirsty Ones!

I bet you cannot name the largest desert on earth. Precipitation defines a desert. If the land is thirsty most of the year, that land is desert. It fascinates me that the largest desert in the world is in Antarctica. What little precipitation it gets blows around, and over long periods gets packed into ice sheets.

I am not from a freezing desert; I am from a hot one. Arizona includes three named deserts and neighbors a fourth: The Sonoran, The Mojave, The Chihuahuan, and the Great Basin. Tucson, my hometown in the Sonoran Desert, receives an annual average of twelve inches of rain. In Houston, in a bad deluge, we have had twelve inches in a matter of hours.

When the word is used poetically, “desert” can mean a dry period in terms of hardship and misery. When peoples of the earth suffer oppression, banishment, or any major devastation it is a desert experience. Unless despair has completely swallowed them, a suffering people still visualize the relief to come. In their desperate escape from the dust bowl, the characters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are pressed by despair. They visualize a golden life in California where their nourishment will be overhead in the lush orchards, and they will just reach up and pluck relief from the branches.

Visions of hope do not picture going from one predicament of suffering to a new one, though this does happen. Hope is realized when actual relief comes. The prophet Isaiah paints in words just such a vision. Generations of Israelites had been stuck in a foreign land, so that their home, Jerusalem, was long dried up and in a meager state. Now God is communicating through Isaiah that Jerusalem can rejoice, and the people be glad. Their home, like a mother, is revived and robust to feed them as a mother feeds her baby:

…and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bodies shall flourish like the grass. (Isaiah 66:12b -13)

I am amazed at how the Sonoran Desert has its flora supported by so little rain. The giant Saguaro cactus has roots just beneath the desert floor, spanning out in radii that match its height. The ocotillo looks dry and dead, but any drink of rain can bloom, leaf out, and support insects and fauna that need it. The grasses can look spent and gone, but it comes back and so continues to flourish in rhythms that match the conditions. So, in our lives, things can be like a desert, but God breaks through, giving signs that life is resuming. Look for it, feel it, and know it. As God says through the prophet (Isaiah 66:12), “I will extend prosperity to her like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream.”