The desert shall blossom

When Isaiah sees the end of the wilderness, he does not see the people finally escaping it. He sees the wilderness itself change. The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. The dry land is not abandoned for greener country; it is made glad. The desert does not stay a desert the people are at last led out of; it rejoices, it blossoms, it breaks into flower where there had been only sand. And the water that does it comes up in the unlikeliest place of all: in the wilderness itself, waters break out, streams run in the desert. Not somewhere beyond it, after the long crossing. In it.

This is a deeper hope than rescue, and it is worth sitting with the difference. Rescue gets you out of the hard place. What Isaiah sees is the hard place itself transformed — the very ground of your thirst becoming the ground of bloom. God does not only lead His people out of deserts. He has a way of making the desert flower, so that the soil of the worst season turns out, in time, to be the most fruitful of all.

When you are in a long dry season, the only outcome you can imagine wanting is out. Get me out of this. Lead me somewhere else, anywhere that is not this barren stretch. That prayer is honest and God hears it. But Isaiah holds out something better than the exit you are praying for, and it is worth letting your hope grow large enough to take it in: not merely escape from the desert, but the blossoming of it. The very place that has been dry and barren becoming, in God's hands, the most fruitful ground you will ever stand on.

This reframes the whole season. If the desert can blossom, then the years in it are not a write-off to survive and forget. The thirst, the barrenness, the long ache for water — these may turn out to be the very conditions in which something grows that could grow nowhere else. Waters break out in the wilderness — in it, not after it. So do not pray so hard for the exit that you miss the bloom. God may not relocate you. He may make this dry place flower under your feet.