Water in the Desert

When you have less of something, you value it more. In desert places, water is guarded and conserved carefully as a precious natural resource. And the animals and plants that live there have to adapt to life with less water in order to survive.

For faith-seeking artists, the world can be a vast and dreadful desert, which is why my week at the Glen Workshop was for me a week of great worth, like water in a desert. And it strikes me how essential water is to that full and abundant life promised by Christ. I can go for years and years without it; I can pray for it, reminisce about it, dream about it, but eventually I have to be able to stick my face down and drink in order to remember who I am, in order to become who Christ tells me I am.

But there is an element of surprise to all of this—to water in the desert, which is so rare it almost shouldn’t be there; and to the long, deep satisfaction of communion, which is what I wrote about to begin with before I ever left for the workshop. The surprise is that no matter how many miles apart we are, we are also so close together, closer than I would have ever thought. Which makes me believe that water can show up anywhere. Even in the desert. And where there is water, there just might be flowers.