18
Joshua Tree

Jesus said, “I am leaving you, but I am leaving you the Great Comforter, who will be with you.”1

Here’s the problem I have with this whole Great Comforter thing: sometimes I don’t feel the Great Comforter and I am pretty sure He’s hopped a jet to Fiji. I am going through a pivotal life crisis and He is sipping from a twirly straw stuffed into a giant coconut, white-sun-screened nose, swinging back and forth in a hammock at the foot of the ocean.

I want to find God and hear His voice. The voice that says it’s going to be okay and miracles will happen and all things will be restored exactly how I imagine they should be. Jesus on a bullhorn with a detailed agenda. Is that too much to ask? I am listening, but the only thing I hear is the pounding of my own heart. The breath flowing in and out of my lungs. And I wonder where God is. Why is the Great Comforter hiding from me? Why has He left me alone here in my lostness and hopped a jet to Fiji?

When I can’t hear, I confuse my not hearing with the idea that God is momentarily not present with me. That He’s unavoidably unavailable. All too quickly I begin to believe that I will have to walk through my lostness while the Great Comforter remains silent. But this is where I get it completely wrong.

The Great Comforter is incapable of being silent. I just didn’t know this until I took a drive through the real-life Arizona desert.

Highway 93 from Phoenix, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, is a parched, dry stretch of road through cactus, dirt, lizards, birds, massive rock formations, and strange little Joshua trees that dot the desert as far as the eye can see. I remember the first time I drove that highway and saw Joshua trees with their oddly shaped trunks and limbs, like a million hands reaching up to heaven. The branches of the trees were covered in bright evergreen leaves that looked like swords, and tiny desert birds basked in the shade of their blossoms. It’s silly really, but until that moment my idea of a desert came complete with visions of Charlton Heston as Moses and the sweeping African Sahara with well-whipped dust storms, bones of unfortunate souls who didn’t make it to the other side, and the occasional camel. Deserts meant death, not life.

But on the road between Phoenix and Las Vegas, there was life. In that desert, there were heartbeats.

Little flowers and shrubs sprouting oddly out of parched, desert land. Critters. Birds. Bugs. Cactus. Endless miles of real-life trees. Trees that can grow fifty feet tall, live for hundreds of years, and have extensive underground roots. The Joshua trees captured me with their simple beauty. Their very existence astounded me. I found myself staring out the window with tears running down my face like a crazy lady. Joshua trees were living proof that life exists in the desert and the impossible has become possible. God has done as He promised: water in the wastelands, streams in the desert. I knew in that moment, I am a Joshua tree.

The fact that I survive, even grow and thrive in my desert season of lostness has little to do with my own ability to stay alive. It has everything to do with the fact that I am kept alive and sustained by the Giver of Life. It has everything to do with the truth that even when my life seems silent and barren, if there is a heartbeat, then the Great Comforter is present. Is a heartbeat not God’s most basic presence? How can the Giver of Life be non-present if life is present? If there is a heartbeat, there is a God. He dwells within us—who are created in His very image.

In his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen says, “The true voice of love is a very soft and gentle voice speaking to me in the most hidden places of my being.”2

For the longest time, we have been taught to listen for God’s voice in order that we might get answers. He might tell us yes or no. Which way. Right or wrong. We come to God with wishes and demands as if we are asking a genie or a Magic 8 Ball to give us what we need. Waiting for the water to slosh back to see the inky words uncovered. Walking away frustrated and confused when we don’t hear God give us a specific answer. Our assumption about God’s presence is all too often based on whether words magically appear on the 8 Ball or come through a bullhorn. We bemoan God’s silence. As if He is not speaking. As if God can ever be quiet. The Great Comforter is intricately woven into my soul, and His indwelling presence is creating a sound, even if it is only the sound of life beating on in the desert of my lostness.

God is never utterly silent. Job 33 says, “God speaks, now one way, now another . . . in a dream, in a vision of the night when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds.”3 I like this passage because it gives God permission to show up in my dreams and gives me permission to say He did (which means I sound a little less crazy). If I do not hear God in a big booming voice, perhaps I will hear Him in my dreams. Perhaps visions in the night. Perhaps simply the beating of my own heart. God speaks, now one way, now the other.

While I search for answers and wonder why He is quiet, God’s voice is present.

I am here. Steady. Constant. Sustaining you. You, a creature that should not survive in the desert.

Don’t you hear the beating of your own heart?

Then you have heard My voice.

That’s my paraphrase of Isaiah 43. The best chapter in the Bible, if you ask me. What it really says is,

Forget the former things;

do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness

and streams in the wasteland.

The wild animals honor me,

the jackals and the owls,

because I provide water in the wilderness

and streams in the wasteland,

to give drink to my people, my chosen,

the people I formed for myself

that they may proclaim my praise.4

Where there are streams and deserts in barren lands, where there are people alive in utter wilderness, where there is sustenance in the presence of death and burying and lostness, there is God.

God making a way in the wilderness.

God bringing teeny-tiny streams into utter wastelands.

God being honored by wild animals because of His gracious provisions.

God reaching down and scooping out cruel, sun-scorched earth and pouring in water.

God making streams, giving streams, bringing streams—always streams, it seems.

Rarely gushing rivers of insane abundance, as some like to promise, but streams and springs. Just enough water. Always bringing life to His children in deserts where water has no right to find its way coursing a path and offering up hope. Where Joshua trees should never be expected to survive.

I am a Joshua tree. I can never not hear God. If I am alive, then God is speaking. His voice is evident in the streams of living water keeping me alive. The water is God’s voice. God’s answer. Sometimes God speaks without words; sometimes His answer is simply the next drink of water. So I am learning to hear God in the wastelands of lostness, because to hear the heartbeat that sustains life in barren wilderness is to hear God Himself.