John 7:37 HCSB
I can’t answer for you, but at times my soul has seemed very dry. No moisture at all. Not even the Living Water could be found in my soul. Reading the Scriptures and praying didn’t even help. It just seemed as if God was nowhere to be found, and I was in an arid time of my life with no indication as to how long it would last. My prayers seemed to be unheard, and my service to God was more out of habit or duty than anything else. Some might call it “burnout,” but I didn’t care what it was called. I felt empty and drained.
Sometimes it could be explained by looking at how my heart had grown cold, and how I had allowed compromise to sneak in and mar my relationship with my Heavenly Father. Perhaps I had been sick or even exhausted with the work. But other times when it happened there was no explanation at all. Where were those streams of living water I had been promised?
My soul felt like the driest place on earth.
That’s why when I read about the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is actually known as “the driest place on earth,” that I really paid attention. Climatologists have dubbed the center of the area as an “absolute desert,” a place where rainfall had never before been recorded. NASA has used Atacama to study what it might be like on the surface of Mars. It’s even been used as a location for filming Mars scenes for movies, because that’s about what it looks like.
This past year (2015) that 600-mile long desert had an historic amount of rain, and the desert was “transformed into a lush floral wonderland of pink flowers.” Twice this year, in March and August, heavy rainstorms have caused catastrophic floods and mudslides. And twice the desert has bloomed—profusely.
Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of brightly-colored blossoms literally covered nearly every square foot of Altacama. Along with the flowers came lizards, insects and birds--life.
Daniel Diaz, National Tourism Service director in Atacama, said, “The intensity of blooms this year has no precedent.” Twenty thousand tourists were expected to travel to the desert to see the flowers, which were expected to last until November.
Reading about that phenomenon gave me hope for my own dryness. If God cares about those tiny flowers, and Matthew 6:30 tells us that He does, then He surely cares about me. Isaiah 44:3 assures us “For I will pour water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out My Spirit on your descendants and My blessing on your offspring.” I know it was a prophetic word for the nation of Israel, but when I read those words, I am strangely comforted, because I know He will pour out just the water that I need for my thirsty land.
Dry times come to every soul, but the rains will come again, and our souls will blossom like the Atacama Desert.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do in the meantime. We must make sure that we stay in touch with God. For those thirsty times, we should make absolutely sure that we are drinking from the right fountain. Jesus said in John7:37, “If anyone is thirsty, he should come to Me and drink!”
--Rocky Henriques, www.uticabc.com