journals from the desert

I want to give.
Daily my heart's desire is met with my self greed. I am tired of shoving aside my irritations and of personalities that annoy me. I am at war with what I so desire and what carries such quick gratification.

So I am living in the desert trying to accept my freedom from my old life of slavery. But my freedom does not feel complete. Often it feels more binding. I am traveling to the promised land but my desert life seems so bleak it is hard not to remember the safety of my slavery.

My slavery is a picture, a life already experienced-tangible. I remember the sweet juice of its empty fruits. The pain is but a word "remember the pain?" I tell myself. No. it's a word- no longer does it carry an ache. So, unbidden, those pictures play in my head over and over calling, distorting, and confusing me. My old life was so easy, reality is so far.

My reality is this desert. This harsh land that I walk where I can't always figure out what is good and what is sweet. I keep returning to my tent to play those pictures because I deceive myself thinking the fruit I remember will satisfy…though it always leaves a deeper thirst.

But I grow tired of pictures and I find that I need to learn to breathe the passing desert and the coming reality of the Promised Land. Sometimes I gain the courage to face the desert and look over the harsh land and look for God. The panoramic dunes are too harsh but I see his beauty reflected in one grain of sand that blows across the desert floor.

This grain of sand on my fingertip.

My torment and hunger for my prison world dissipates and a peace of true reality descends on me. I look up to see God alive in the people milling around me. Life becomes clear. My questions are not answered but they no longer torment me. I rest in the reality of my future home. I see that I cannot live in Heaven while I walk on earth- but that this desert can contain such beautiful fragments of that Promised Land that I can not want anything less. I have seen and tasted the pearl of great price in the grain of sand and shall want and seek for nothing but to have that pearl, to embody it, to share it, until I hold it in my hands forever.

I wish I could find a way to carry that grain of sand with me. So often wind comes and blows it from my hand and I turn to see where it went and find the shadows of my old world. Sometimes it requires such concentration. The beauty and strength that envelops me when I hold that fragment in my hand…yet it's a mystery how quickly it slips through my fingers. I crave those fragments.

The tangible daily excursions of life rob me of it so often. The enemy seeks to recapture me in the most cunning and supple ways. He blows through the desert and finds my cracks of weakness, my doubt, my personal irritations, tired body, and too late…I see my gain of sand gone.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
~William Blake, Auguries of Innocence