Wandering in the Desert

I remember my first adventure in the desert.  I was 17, shy, cautious, but with an inner thirst for adventure that drove me forward.  I was a Rocky Mountain girl reared among lush pines and crisp high altitude air.  I was afraid to meet the desert.  It was foreboding, unfriendly, and potentially deadly.

My friends and I backpacked for days through Big Bend National Park in south Texas.  We used compasses and maps to guide us.  We refilled our canteens with rank mosquito infested stale water, because it was the only water to be found and trusted to healthy doses of chlorine to preserve our lives while drinking it.   Then came the most dreaded part of the trip, the  24 hour 'solo'.  Our guides dropped us off individually, out of view from one another, and we were to spend 24 hours alone.  We were allowed a sleeping bag, water, and a journal.  That's it.

I was terrified.  I imagined poisonous spiders, scorpions and snakes gleefully swarming over me and feasting on my flesh.  I imagined the rest of the group moving on and forgetting about me, not remembering until my bleached bones laid exposed on my rotting sleeping bag that there had once been one more member of the group. 

Fortunately, my real solo experience was nothing like that.  I sat alone until the quiet of the desert sank into my soul.  My eyes began to see the beauty of the sandy colors.  My ears began to hear the desert melody.  God whispered in my ear.  I emerged from solo changed.  Unafraid.  Even in love with the harsh beauty of that place.

Life took me into a longer solo a few years later when the man I married at 19 years old began anesthetizing his own pain in the arms of other women.  Again I was terrified.  Again I thought I could never survive.  I was sure that no one before me had ever suffered pain so paralyzing and pervasive and lived to tell about it.  I desperately clung to the dream of the life I wanted to live and fled from the reality that lay before me.

Gradually though, a quiet voice calmed my soul.  He spoke to me.  He said "I allured you here, to this barren desert to woo you.  I wanted to draw you to a place where you could hear me speaking tenderly to you.  I have a vineyard full of sweetness growing for you, in the proper season.  This desert of trouble is your door of hope."   

I don't mean to say that it was instantly easy from that moment on.  The journey was still hot and dry and difficult.  The days when I had to concentrate on merely putting one foot in front of the other, strung together until I couldn't remember when they began.  But eventually, I found the vineyard, and learned to hear the voice of the God who loves me a bit more clearly.

During those desert days I prayed for someone to journey alongside me.  I would like to travel alongside you.  I would like to share more of my story and hear some of yours.  I would like to be a sign post pointing to hope ahead, no matter what the road you are traveling looks like. 

Ann