Some time ago, when my husband had been teaching at a university for several years, his position came up for tenure. To our dismay, the vote was negative, and although several of his colleagues felt it had been unfair, we knew he had to leave the university at the end of the academic year, which was rapidly approaching. Our first reaction was one of complete devastation. We'd both grown up in the part of the country where we were living, and we loved it. We had two very small children and a new house, much of which we'd built ourselves. The thought of losing all this made me feel like we were entering a "desert time."
Utter desolation for miles and miles is an image I became more familiar with recently when I traveled through an extensive desert area in the Holy Land. The landscape made me wonder how the prophet Isaiah could envision that "the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. ... for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert." Isa. 35:1, 6.
As I pondered the prophet's vision, I concluded that God's presence must have been so palpable to those early desert Israelites, that regardless of what they saw with their eyes, they accepted the creative activity of their God as tangibly true. For them, the world they perceived with their material senses—a barren, desolate land—was not the ultimate truth. Instead, as Isaiah proclaimed, it was the fruitfulness of God's presence that was the reality, supporting and sustaining these desert-dwellers and travelers by producing whatever they needed, whenever they needed it.
