A Flower in the Desert

Many of us have experienced events that have turned the world upside-down and crushed the idea of life as we knew it. Maybe it was like a tornado: you were picked up, swirled around, slammed down, and when you rose back to your feet everything around you was destroyed. You were picked up from a thriving habitat and set back down in a wasteland. A never-ending wasteland. At least that’s how it was for me at the time of my lupus diagnosis. For quite a while, it was all wasteland, all the time, broken up only by mirages on the horizon that melted upon my approach. Then finally, after weeks of going to bed every night not knowing how on earth I’d get through the next day, I found a hint of a true oasis somewhere. Call it a flower in the desert. It was beautiful. It was hope. It was fresh and alive where I was dead and withered.

That flower was several chapters of the book of Hosea. I had not picked up my Bible in a long time. It had seemed so heavy to me, so heavy with things I couldn’t ever get right and knowledge too lofty for my understanding. I was tired. I was done. But for some reason—I don’t remember why—I began Hosea. After a few chapters, I found myself relating to the people in it, whose cities had been ravaged by famine and destruction. I felt just like them; I felt like the nation of Israel personified. But after the chaos and pain there was a promise from God for hope and restoration tenfold, but this promise could only be accessed if the people left the life they tried so desperately to control, and began to trust God. I know this is not the main storyline of Hosea; this instance was plucked out from a chapter or two by my fried and frazzled brain.

I sat with that flower and touched its petals tentatively; I explored where the stem went into the ground and imagined the roots there, and the water that fed them, and knew the water had to come from somewhere. I sat with that flower in awe of it’s beauty and baffled by its hints of hope.

I sat with that book and read, and meditated. As I pondered what I’d found, I prayed, asking God what this meant for me. Asking God, “Does this promise apply to me too, or is that just wishful thinking?” Drop by drop, the fresh water of certain words fell into my thirsty mind. They were from the perspective of God, to me. I took out my journal and began to write them down as quickly as they came to me.

I don’t know if God inspired it. Maybe so, along with just the creative part of my brain working up the hypothetical situation of, “how might God respond to me?” I’m not saying God “spoke” to me or I had some big “encounter”. Just some thoughts, that’s all. Some musing on what God might have said to me—or anyone—after life fell apart; the old life that must be destroyed so that a new and better one may have room to grow. This was what I wrote down:

“Yes, I burned your cities to the ground; yes, your enemies took everything from you and I let them. I know you’re left with nothing and I know I took it all. I wept as I watched; I felt every stab of your pain. But I had hope for you, even if you didn’t, because I knew what could now come next. I will give back grander cities and greater wealth than was stolen from you. You’re squatting in a run-down shed left over from your sacked and ruined city, and you’ve diluted yourself into thinking it’s a palace. It’s full of mold that’s making you sick, the roof leaks water on your face at night, vermin infect your food after taking their share. Yet you refuse to come out. If you don’t come out, you’ll never see what else there is for you. You are slowly dying in there. I told you that; I knocked and shouted it through the cracks in the door you locked, so steadfast against Me. You didn’t listen. So, I have to destroy that dangerous dwelling you built for yourself; that house that could fall on you at any second. I need to get you out of there. What else can I do? I begin at the opposite side so you have time to flee the wrecking ball. You stumble onto the grass outside just in time to realize that your “grand palace” is gone, and everything you ever had. Destroyed. You curse Me for destroying it and grieve your losses. I wait for you to stop for a moment and I say, “But now, you can have this.” And now your eyes could gaze in wonder at the true palace before you—the kind of marble and gold and velvet and silver that had grown so dim in your memory that you replaced those things with tin walls and rotten wood and stained fabric scraps and aluminum. With trash you reconstructed it the best you could by yourself, then locked yourself inside while marvelous kingdoms grew around you. I knocked on your door every day, to show you the progress the builders made on your very own palace. But you wouldn’t come out. Finally your palace was all done and I was so excited to show you true glory, but you wanted your patchwork delusions. You loved that thing in an unhealthy way; you were too attached to something dirty and dangerous. It was going to fall and crush you slowly, painfully. It may have seemed like chaos to you as the roof crashed down and the toxic dust caught in your throat, but the way I broke it down really was controlled, and all for love of you. It had to be destroyed so that you could come outside and see the real thing, the thing you were trying so hard to rebuild yourself. See? Now you don’t have to settle for moth-eaten blankets and rat-tattered bread. Now you can feel the softest silks and velvets on the skin of your soul, and you can feast on the richest, most flavorful delicacies that I made for you Myself. I understand you’re hurting still; now come inside so I may give you rest.”

My desert flower, promising an oasis to come if only I would stop wallowing in the grime and sitting stubbornly in the oppressive, blistering heat that was my circumstance. Wandering, I had found this flower. Hoping and trusting in God, living with some purpose, I knew that someday I would find a true oasis.

Mechanics v. Atmosphere

I need to do more things. Someone far smarter than myself told me that experiences are most critical in changing thought processes, and I have some thought processes I need to change. I’m getting better at just trying things, even if they might not work out, and just seeing what sticks. Cause sometimes things do, though not often. Still, you never know. And so I want to try an experiment. I’m not sure what kind yet; some kind of experience. An experimental experience. Maybe I will try to go days at a time without speaking. I have always been so curious about what that might be like, but I know it would make no sense to those around me who would expect me to communicate efficiently.

That would definitely be an experience, not using my voice for days. Maybe that would help change my faulty logic. It makes sense to me—my logic does—but it doesn’t make me “happy”, and, apparently, it is not true.

For example, I feel as if one shouldn’t feel especially good about oneself just for doing things that are generally expected, such as graduating high school, being independently capable of basic functioning, not breaking the law, or not being hateful to other people. My thought has been, “you don’t get brownie points for achieving the mediocre”. If you do something at an above-average level, you deserve to feel sort of good about it. If you do something at an average level, you are allowed to feel neutral or—at best—vaguely satisfied. If your performance is below-average, well…you see where I am going with this.

But, apparently, that sort of thinking isn’t necessarily true. And it is certainly a discouraging way to live. Because I often fail to do things that are “generally expected”, or just barely do them by the skin of my teeth, following my own logic I have no right to feel anything but disappointed with myself. In theory, I know this isn’t right. One should be able to feel good about the good choices one makes: the choice to study instead of not, to make an effort socially, to put some effort into functioning independently, to exercise, to stop and think, to make use of gifts and talents, to finally take a shower even though you’re not even going anywhere today. People should feel good about that sort of thing, about just not totally failing at life. And I know that, in my head. In that part of my mind that actually controls my thoughts and emotions, though, not so much.

If you’ve ever opened up one of those self-help books, perhaps you’ve encountered the conundrum of being told that “you are not your feelings” and “your feelings don’t have to control you” while at the same time being pelted with all sorts of information on how to redirect your thought processes purely so that you can have better feelings. The bits of my mind that I trust are all cranks and levers and gears, and to those bits that seems like a dry sort of joke. But the bits of my mind that puzzle me—the bits that are all ebbs and flows and unpredictable weather—want to understand it very badly because maybe somewhere in that riddle is the key to…something. Something that the gears and levers think I shouldn’t need, but that the snow in summertime thinks is essential to my survival.

I am a psychology major and sometimes all of it just makes me want to gag and bang my head against a wall simultaneously.
But on the other hand I know that it is all true and that it has helped millions of people.
My right and left brain are constantly clashing and I am very, very tired of thinking so much but what else is there to do in this little town? I do love to think; thinking is my favorite. But some things cannot be thought out and my brain crashes.

For all of that, though, the concept has made me feel more peaceful in certain ways. It is nice knowing in at least part of my mind that my worth need not be dependent on my productivity.
I'll put it this way: The gears are still churning, but the weather is a bit calmer.