The desert // and the oasis

In a random conversation with a friend the other, we began discussing the differences between the desert and the oasis. Here’s my take.

Someone’s gonna call me crazy, but I’m not completely convinced that you can always tell an immediate difference when you’re on the inside of them, and here’s what I mean. They can both be places where “growth” is not happening to you personally in big ways, rather you’re just kind of hanging out. “Say what?” you may be thinking to yourself.

I think that sometimes God allows us to sit in an oasis area just to process what we’ve learned. Like a desert experience, there may not be much forward growth and so you may be walking around thinking to yourself, “I’m not growing, why does God have me in this dry desert area right now?” When in reality, you might should be saying to yourself, “God, this place I am in is not really like a desert in that I feel completely lost and broken and empty. Really, things are good, I’ve just come out of a desert or I’ve just come out of an amazing place of growth. Perhaps this is an oasis area that I need to just process all that happened instead of wanting to grow again.”

Again, I could be completely off base, but I really think that God occassionally takes us through places like that before the next big experience. We need times to debrief and think about what happened. But that’s often difficult for us because we are people of extremes usually that need to be really high or really low and we just view those times as more desert places.

I just read all that, and I didn’t eve make sense to myself.