Into the Desert

Getreadywithmemamma cactus edition. Do you ever feel like you are wandering through life and it is a desert. A season in which there is not abundance and a time when you feel isolated? When we first moved to our new home and we faced a miscarriage and my son’s speech delay, I felt like we had landed on a desert planet. There were times when I felt too empty to even cry, I just walked through the vast and barren days creating normalcy for my family, but holding onto pain internally. There have been other seasons that I have felt this way. Life doesn’t always offer us our wishlist of things to walk through. My life has actually been a series of experiences that I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen for myself. I was either born into some like being biracial, or a daughter of an immigrant. Both things that I consider to be strengths, but still things I had to wrestle with. Or, I found myself doing them partially due to necessity, partially, because I felt God calling me towards them as in all of my service positions. I am a caregiver by profession and calling. It’s deep within me. I’ve just always enjoyed nurturing things around me. However, I’ve also been all too familiar with caregiver burn out. I remember watching a movie about Nicholas Cage as a paramedic with some serious caregiver burn out. The man was seeing ghosts of his past patients. I was working with adults with developmental disabilities and the emotions he experienced were way too close to home. We went on a vacation that summer which rejuvenated me, but as we walked around “The Devil’s Tower” in Wyoming I contemplated those feelings again. I felt like my life had no meaning, that those whom I cared for felt none of which I strode to do for them and that there was no meaning in my day to day endless striving to make hope for others. It took me until this desert mass that stood with questionable origin and mystical existence to discover why this had happened. All around the tower were tiny cacti that you wouldn’t notice at first, because you couldn’t help, but to stare deeply into the Tower’s massive sides as you hiked around it. But, as the day’s heat penetrated your thought process, you would start to see them, twinkling at first, in the periphery of your sight. Tiny points that caught your thoughts all around you like a star constellation pointing your way back home away from “The Devil’s Tower”. You see, when we lose hope, when we lose faith and we are isolated. When all of our work, or effort seems in vain. God comes near and gives us life giving plants like cacti. The cacti at first, seem as sharp and as pointy as the barren land of our desert. Until, we look closer. Until, we actually break one open and taste it’s refreshing fruit. Until, we take a step back and see the constellation of stars that was there all along on the the desert floor, pointing us home to where we belong.