Italy, Holland, and the Desert Reality

In the years that I helped out with the local Joni & Friends chapter, there was a story that was shared to help explain what it was like to have a baby with special needs. Preparing to have a baby was likened to planning a trip to Italy. But those chosen to have a child with disability get to their destination and find themselves in Holland instead. They have to choose to see the beauty in their actual location instead of the one that they always dreamed of.

This story keeps running through my head lately. But we have not been given a life affected by special needs. My plot twist involves the expectations of raising kids in a Christian home. Was I too ambitious? I thought I had realistically planned for the "Holland." I didn't think I had camped on the idyllic Italian outcome. I knew things wouldn't be perfect - I knew I'd have to content myself with tulips and windmills over gondolas and Venetian masterpieces. But this...

This feels like getting off the long, long flight and discovering our destination was actually the Sahara desert. No dykes and wooden shoes and Dutch gables, just barren wilderness - miles of sand, hot and dry...

How did we get here?

Was this the promise after all the work of prayer and Bible reading and schooling at home and reiterating the lessons of character and doling out discipline and guarding from the world and its technology and its influence?

Where is the beauty in this?

I see snakes and scorpions and cracked dry earth, sparsely covered in thorny brush, overshadowed by the ever-present threat of wind-blown sand.

But... can I claim that He isn't here? That this is truly the God-forsaken place?

I sigh, and cry, and clench my fists, shaking them at the emptiness I see and feel, but... I know the desert. And...

I love the desert.

I grew up here.

Not metaphorically. In metaphors, my childhood was thoroughly "Italian"! But literally, my childhood unfolded in the desert. I grew up running through the hot sand, barefoot, skillfully avoiding (mostly) the thorns and goatheads. We made forts under the sagebrush and watched anthills teem for hours on end. 

And we loved it. Sometimes it is true, the heat feels oppressive enough to literally kill you, but the dry warmth is one of the most comforting feelings I know. It doesn't rain much in the desert, but when it does, the creosote bushes give off the most amazing smell as the air fills with the additional aroma of damp earth. Our favorite vacations have been spent at desert lakes - the oppressive heat tempered with refreshing water. At the end of the day, the darkness is impossible to escape - but through it, the stars shine with extra brightness, showing off galaxies rarely seen in more populated areas. And nothing beats a sunset in the desert - they say the reason for their splendor is all of the dust in the air...

There is beauty here. 

If I will choose to see it.

The problem is not that God is not here. The problem is that I am afraid if I admit I can see Him here, He will leave me here. That this state of a dry, dusty soul, unceasingly seeking drops of living water is an unacceptable way to live. But is it? 

If I am truthful, I will admit that I have lived the "right" life for the wrong reasons. I do want to please the Father, but I also was striving for the permission to live the easier life. The Holland life. I thought I could earn a passage on a different voyage. 

"But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy [so it seems]... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they [are having] there. And for the rest of your life, you will say 'Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned.' And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss," wisely states the special needs illustration. 

"But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland." 

Or be free to see the evidences of God's love here in the desert places.

And to know that no matter how long we spend here in this arid reality, far from our Italian dreamland, that He has given the way for us to ensure that the desert heat need not be our eternal home. And tomorrow's promise of a forever, Italy-eclipsing, promised-land can never be eroded by any amount of dry, hot, dusty todays. 

 "The Lord your God who goes before you will Himself fight for you, just as He did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries His son, all the way that you went until you came to this place." Deut. 1:30

 "For the Lord comforts Zion; 

He comforts all her waste places 

and makes her wilderness like Eden, 

her desert like the garden of the Lord; 

joy and gladness will be found in her,

thanksgiving and the voice of song." 

Isaiah 51:3

"...Who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end." Deut 8:15-16

"Remember not the former things,

nor consider the things of old.

Behold, I am doing a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert."

Isaiah 43:18-19

{For the unabridged "Welcome to Holland" story, follow the link: Holland.html}