The Desert that Feeds the World

I’m a desert rat at heart. Much of my sense of the wonder and mystery of life was formed in the washes of deserts, around blossoming Ocotillos and towering Saguaros, and skies heavy with Monsoon thunderheads heaving above with light, pouring forth floods. My sense of the vastness of the cosmos was shaped by campouts with my granddad, sleeping bags thrown into the back of his tan F150 Ford pickup out on the shores of Lake Pleasant. As the day’s heat would fade to the dry cool of a desert night, we’d pick out the planets and stars as they’d come out of their day long hiding. As the sky faded to black velvet, the luminous Milky Way would make its cosmic debut, spilled milk splashing across the vastness. With field glass enhanced eyes, we connected constellations and tracked speeding satellites, and watched the white pastel blur of Haley’s Comet in its stately circuit.

In the presence of this vastness with huge skies above and jagged edges on the beautiful horizons, I connected with a sense of the limitless in life. Early on there formed in me a craving for the possibilities and creativity intimated in these vistas…an openness I’ve sought throughout my life.

But reality assails; I am beset by limitations. Some of them are biological; my body is that of a thirty year old, but I can feel in my knees that they are no longer twenty. Early white wires of hair tell the story of slow obsolescence. This body is not eternal.

Some of my limitations are relational—the choices of family and the obligations that come with nurturing a marriage and raising two precious human beings. If I value these relationships, I will choose directions that honor them and the privilege and responsibility of having them.

Some of my limitations are sinful…the stuff of the brokenness that encroaches my fallible heart…the self-centeredness and self-reliance that seeks to displace in me the God of the universe described above as center and source of my life.

The truth is, I am a nexus of limitation in a universe of possibilities, and I rail against those limitations. It doesn’t even matter if the limitations aren’t really there; still I balk. Perhaps I want to be God. But I don’t believe that. I do want to be connected to him though, and the space of the eternal.

I had the privilege of seeing my childhood best friend John last May while in Tucson for my brother’s high school graduation. We had several rich conversations, but one in particular stands out. He said to me, “Nathan, the best creativity comes from a context of limitations.” (My paraphrase)

I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking through that statement since…mostly struggling with it. I want those vast horizons and infinite resources to play and create in. I don’t want to accept limitations and constraints as natural or even desirable to the creative processes of life in which I am called to play even a small part.

John’s right.

It’s taken a bit of work to admit it. But his observation (though perhaps he wouldn’t see it as such) is a holy one. It discerns the paradoxes of life in play around us; that the eternal works through the finite.

When Noah and his family climbed into that Big Boat…

When Moses raised his staff in the face of the Reed Sea…

When Jesus took several loaves and fishes and fed five thousand…

When he turned water into wine…

When his insignificant death becomes the redemption of the cosmos in his resurrection…

Jesus walked and worked in deserts, was tempted in the wilderness of one, and crucified amidst its jagged rocks. At first glance, deserts are a place of incredible limitation, a moisture poor environment the context for the epic struggle of life. But the thing is, if you look closely, within the limitations of their ecologies, deserts flourish with life, such is their creativity.

I am learning about limitations and that God works, moves, and makes things new in the midst of them. I am learning that John is right. And in the middle of this learning, as I sit in this limited human form, I am coming to terms with a universe of possibility confined in the apparently finite.

This evening, I thank God for such paradoxes…