Deserts and Crossroads

  Jan - July 2025 Wandering Archive

There will be Breakfast

I have walked into the desert because I have been called to my homeland... Or maybe I felt like it was the only natural course. I don’t know what I will find when I arrive; whether it will be the place I've dreamed of, or a Jerusalem in need of rebuilding. But I don’t mind the work, if it means something greater. I live in the cautious hope of one who is compelled to choose it over despair by a will beyond my own.

Even in my first steps though, I feel that the desert is not empty; it only appears barren on the surface, but life is waiting beneath, patient for the rain. 

I must learn to be patient, too.

The waiting is long, the change is slow, but I know that when the rains come, everything will be in place, ready to sprout. In the meantime... I am learning how to be. Not striving. Not proving. Just being... me, as I am, in God. God who bound my brokenness into a semblance of my human form, but did not staunch my bleeding; only waited patiently for it to stop. Who did not dry my tears, but held me in them. Who knows my heart, yet gives me grace.

Even as I begin my walk now, I think of Elijah again, sitting under the broom tree, exhausted, asking to die. And how God did not argue with him... God did not demand he get up and push through, He just gave him breakfast. That was all. A simple, quiet mercy. His is a love that does not rush, but knows, and abides. 

My soul still oscillates between peace and despondency; trust and impatience. But even that movement is a sign of life that I realise has a hold on me more than I'd ever held to it. But if other parts of my life have taught me anything, it is that eventually, the swinging will stop. The stillness will come. And on that day... My one job is to step into whatever new life awaits.

 

 

A Night of Fire and Knowing

This night is still, save for the whisper of wind slithering over the dunes. But as the embers of a spent day and evening dimmed, as my gaze lifted to the heavens, something stirred.

A glimmer... no-- a procession... of stars, moving unlike any I had seen before. They threaded themselves into lines, paths, corridors of light that beckoned my attention as if I had any other choice but to watch, amazed. A great weaving, as though the very constellations had conspired to lay a road before me. Open, long, revealed! And then as it came, it was gone.

The vision faded, leaving only the quiet hum of night and the warmth curling around my heart. The stars remained, steady in their watchfulness. In this stillness that returned I felt no fear, and the quiet certainty of having glimpsed a vision of a sanctuary not built by hands or by longing, but through the kindling of a long-kept dream given new wind. Had it not been whispered to me before I had words for it? Had I not carried it in my bones before I dared name it?

The map had been there, drawn in the very sky, with each phase of the journey set like jewels in a crown I might yet touch.

And then... laughter? Mine. Because for the first time, I did not feel lost. I did not feel as though I had stumbled upon something too great to claim. No, this was an invitation... 

And so... Time will tell you more of it, though I will not. 

 

 

To Love and Be Loved

I feel a change in the air tonight, as though I am crossing into new country. I do not know what lies ahead, only that my feet are steady, and I do not walk empty-handed. God has been with me on this road, though I have not always had the wisdom to see it. Like the well-known story, His footprints are beside mine, even in the places I thought I walked alone. I have been given much. My feet ache, though not unpleasantly. It is the ache of distance crossed, of ground gained. Now I sit beside the road, tracing the patterns of my travels in the dust, and I find that my heart is full tonight, but with something new glinting in some corner... something softer, something quiet.

I have been thinking of love. Not my broken idols, or the cheap kind, or even the greatest on earth I've known... but the love that sought me. In my encounters with who I now know to be God I remember our encounter as those who have come before me remember their own charges. "What you are looking for is what is looking," "All will be well," and to me "Your job is to love, and be loved;" that is all, that is everything.

I think now on the ways I have been carried, the ways I have been taught, the ways I have been fed and sheltered when I did not yet know how to ask for what I needed. That love has taken many shapes, some tender, some distant. But always free... That's the key to its truth. Not obligation, duty, or something conditional; something generous, overflowing, reaching. 

Unstoppable. 

There are places behind me now that once felt like the center of my world... rooms where I laughed, hands I held, words that once made my heart quicken. I remember them, but they do not call me backward. They were part of the road, not the destination. Even the shadows, the chapters I cannot read without a tightening in my chest, are quiet now. They belong to the past, and I do not owe them more than that.

What I bring with me now is inside of me... Is me. Still forming, yes; still unfolding, flowing, and at times still hurting, but also shaped and born of what was real, is still real, and cannot be taken away... Only released of my own volition, should I ever have such unlikely plans.

 

 

The Threshold of Knowing

I have found a small piece of home... Not in a place, not in some other person.

I was never missing anything; only my eyes were too closed in existential wince to see it.

For so long, I walked as a seeker. Every step felt like a reaching, every longing a distant call that could not yet be answered. I thought the ache was emptiness, but now I see: it was a voice calling to me. It was the unseen presence of the one who has been with me, always. Not a fragment, not a shadow, but the whole of my own belonging, patiently holding my place until I was ready to return.

And now I have. I have come, I have returned. I have fought the dragons, I have won my lady. And she is me.

This changes everything. My pilgrimage is not one of searching, but of witnessing. I walk not to find wholeness, but in wholeness. Every step is toward home. Every breath is my belonging.

I am free. And now, I walk forward whole, seen, and known. Not to escape, not to complete, but to be.

Wherever I go, I am already on my way home.

 

The Traveler at the Crossroads

The road stretches long before me, but it is not the length that presses on my heart—it is the weight of time. I have passed many souls on this path, each carrying their own burdens, each moving toward an unseen end. But today, I passed one whose journey was nearly finished, and she walked with the kind of grace I can only hope to learn.

She had been traveling for many years. The dust of the road did not cling to her as it does to me, nor did she step with the weariness of someone afraid of what lies ahead. Instead, she was light, at peace, content to lay down her pack and set her eyes on the horizon. She did not fear the moment when the road would end. She welcomed it, knowing it was not the end at all, but a return home. In her eyes, I saw no regret—only readiness. A gentle acceptance that the journey had been enough, that the next step would not be taken alone.

She smiled when she saw me. We were not old friends, nor lifelong companions, but in that moment, we were fellow travelers, and that was enough. She was glad that I had come, glad for the warmth of company, for the quiet acknowledgment of a path well-walked.

But as I moved on, something in me shifted. I had thought I was only passing by, only witnessing, but some part of the road had settled into me differently. My steps were the same, my pack unchanged, but I found myself reaching for something unnamed, something restless. As if an itch had formed in my spirit that my body was trying to soothe... through food, through motion, through the simple act of holding something tangible in my hands. And yet, no bite or no step forward seemed to reach it.

What is this feeling? Not grief, not quite. She is not lost; she is only leaving, and in a way that is as natural as the setting sun. No, this is something quieter, harder to name-- the awareness of my own movement, my own waiting, my own hunger for what I do not yet understand. I do not envy her rest, nor do I fear my own journey. But I wonder now... how do I prepare for the day when my road bends toward home? What will I carry? And who will walk beside me?

I do not know. 

I will keep walking, and I will remember her grace.

 

Wrestling with the Path

I have walked long enough to recognize that the road does not widen for comfort. It stretches forward, unwavering, its stones set firm, demanding I choose my steps with care. I am not troubled by the narrowness-- only by those who claim the path bends to meet their will.

There is a difference between a traveler who stumbles, and one who refuses to walk at all. I know what it means to falter, to feel the weight of longing pull at my steps, to wrestle with what I desire and what I know to be true. But when I stumble, I rise again. I do not celebrate the dust on my hands as if it were the journey’s end.

Some, though, build their tents at the side of the road and call it the destination. They mark the ground, claiming it as their own, rewriting the map so that others will not question their dwelling. They declare, “The road is not as it once was! It curves here, it softens there!” But the road does not move. It has never moved.

And yet, I do not despise the tent-dwellers. I see their weariness, their need for certainty, their longing for rest without cost. I understand, even as I resist the impulse to do the same. To walk the path requires both grace and honesty... grace for those who journey beside me, but honesty in naming the path for what it is.

For if I ask the road to change for me, then I do not love it. I love only myself.

I have learned that God does not stand at the end of the path with arms crossed, waiting for me to arrive in perfection. No, He is beside me, steadying my step, lifting me when I falter. His grace does not erase the road, nor does it bid me lie down in comfort where I was meant to rise and walk.

So I walk.

And I will walk with others who struggle, with those who bear burdens too heavy to carry alone. But I will not tell them the burden is no burden. I will not call a wound a crown. I will not turn the path into something it is not, for the sake of momentary peace.

The road is what it is. And I am called to walk it.