Finding Beauty in Spiritual Deserts

Originally published January 2016.

Last summer, I got in my car and started driving West. I did not come back for a month. At one point, I found myself walking through the Petrified Forest National park in the middle of the desert. There was not another person for miles. I have never been more physically alone. Throughout my long, dry walk, I was trying to grasp how the Spiritual manifests itself in the physical, so I asked God about the significance of our Spiritual Deserts. This is what He told me.

There is something beautiful about our Spiritual deserts, because when we are put in deserts, it is nothing but a blank canvas for God to paint it how he sees fit. Sometimes he paints it with gorgeous rainbows whose colors emit radiant joy and happiness and lightheartedness, and those are the most beautiful seasons where we can run and venture with God without being afraid, where we trust him fully without doubt and let our hand form a bond so tight with His that we let it lead us wherever it pleases. But sometimes the Divine does not want that certain orientation of colors anymore, for it is no longer life-giving to us or he has something that would be more beautiful in mind, but in order for Him to have the ability to paint that new picture, he must first paint our deserts black—a black so dark and thick that no colors from our previous painting can get through, for they would only taint the beauty of the new creation He has in mind next.

A blank slate, a fresh start, a new, pure canvas to work with.

However, once we see him make the first move to dip the paintbrush into the black paint and make contact with the canvas to which we are too attached to leave behind, we beg and plead, “No no don’t take it away, for this is what’s best for me, I know it!” and we steal the paintbrush from Him and say, “I will do this on my own account. Let me do it by myself. Let me paint over the areas I want black and let me keep the areas I want from before in their original color, for I know what is best for me—I am in control.”

But little do we know this leaves us more disillusioned and lost that we would have been if we would have just let Him paint everything black in the first place, for by trying to do it on our own, we leave ourselves in this limbo of desperately trying to preserve and hold on to things from before yet trying to make something beautiful out of what stirrings we see in the newness that God is calling us into, and it’s no use. In this state we are stuck because what we had before is already ruined, yet it is not ruined enough to force us to leave it behind and try to make something new again.

Sometimes, we have to let the Divine paint everything black, a black so dark that we
almost think we are dead, for as much fear and insecurity and helplessness linger in the depths of that darkness, there is also a transcending peace that resides there—where we know nothing, where we are sure of nothing, where purpose and meaning are nowhere to be found, where we have absolutely nothing to hold on to, where we desperately plead for vision. There is sereneity in coming to the place where you can say you literally know nothing in this world and have to start back at the very beginning in order to create some
sort of root system to hold you in place again while the storms and winds rage around you. And since you have let yourself feel and see what resides in the darkest part of your soul, you know that you cannot go any deeper. You cannot go to a place of more despair. You have hit rock bottom, and it is here where you are humbled, where you are refined and made new again, where you are reborn and built up from the miry clay into a new being, a new and better and higher version of yourself, a higher version of humanity—A Spirit that has learned a little more about itself and that has become a little more like the One who created it, which is a beautiful thing.

Not all have the courage to allow their desert to be painted completely black, but coming from that place and seeing the magnificence of the beginnings of the new paintings the Divine artist is crafting in my desert, I encourage you to go there. Push down into the depths of your soul, into the deepest parts of your heart and mind, into the ugliest parts of yourself, and do not shame yourself or criticize yourself for what you discover there, but embrace it.

Let it hurt when it needs to hurt.

Let it feel good when it needs to feel good.

Cry.

Laugh.

Shout.

Whisper.

Praise.

Curse.

Rejoice.

Lament.

Let yourself feel fully the emotions you find there, for it is only then that you will enter into a new state of freedom that you have never seen nor tasted.

We were created to live this life in its most raw state, fully in the present moment, where we have the courage and boldness to live entirely in and by the Spirit, where we live by breathing Him in, only to breathe Him out again.

Cheers to the journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder