Oases in the Desert

Don't we all want to be something?

I would like to think that my life is more, better, exciting... more exciting than sitting here at 11:31pm on a Tuesday night, struggling through the diabolical throes of a bland, desert-dry and utterly unsatisfying final essay. Eight pages of misery. Hours of tedious, sedentary gazing at the inhuman glare of the computer screen. Thoughts of the possibility of bedsores arising from the fact that I truly haven't budged from this perch of butt-numbing boredom in the past innumerable hours.

I know, I am being dramatic and playing up my woebegone plight... but doesn't it really feel this way, sometimes? Like this week, this next nine days will NEVER END? I've got to rally against the despondency... I know there's a light at the end of this tunnel. It really could be so much worse. SO much worse.

But... I feel like I could be so much more. Like I could be striving for something meaningful, far beyond myself and my little bedroom and my potted plant and endless essays....

I guess I just have to trust that God can use me in the mundane, that my boring hours of tedium can really be operating covertly for some greater reason... that through this, something is developing. Some quality, or some lesson, or some shred of longing to draw nearer to my Lord...

I should seek Him in the wasteland of my discouragement. It will not be a wasteland forever. Soon, very, very soon the refreshing rains will come down, sheets of bliss to quench the rasping dry fissures of the desert, they that pitifully croak out curses meant to discourage the lost nomad... pure streams of liquid joy will course through the desert floor, submerging its dusty, cracked skin, rippling and splashing into every cotton-dry nook and around every sunburnt cactus skeleton. Oases in the desert, life to the dreary, Living Water to wet the parched lips of the wanderer. The flood is coming, it will be soon. The border of the wasteland is approaching... I should not despair.

And that concludes tonight's installment of creative writing by T. Hann.... bed time!