Surviving the Flash Flood

By a strange twist of grace I find myself back in the place where my journey toward ordination took a huge leap forward. I am spending three days at the Passionist Retreat Center at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. This is the place where, in 1988, I was interviewed by the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry and recommended for Deacon Ordination and Probationary Membership in the Annual Conference. It was a daunting time and a very humbling time. Once of the most cherished memories of that experience was taking a hike back into the dry wash that lets out of the mountains nearby the Center. All of us who had been recommended for Deacon’s Ordination went for a walk and forged bonds of friendship that sustained us in those early years of ministry. In addition to that cherished memory, today, the wash holds a new and very different image.

If you’ve followed my blog the last few months you’ve noticed that the postings have been a bit lean both in content and frequency. The last few months have been pretty arid for my spirit. I’m not sure that I can account for how I became so dry, in fact I’m not sure I need to account for it. It was a dry time. I’ve come to understand from reading the desert mothers and fathers that dry times will come and go. To use another image, the dark night of the soul is a frequent companion on our spiritual journey.

I’ve experienced enough grace and enough assurance of God’s presence in the last year that I wasn’t freaked out by this period of barrenness. I knew that these times would come and go. It didn’t make it any less dry. It didn’t dull the impact of feeling less of God’s presence and more of God’s absence. I still lamented the sense of spiritual isolation I was experiencing. I missed the feeling of God walking in the garden of my life. (I should clarify that I don’t believe God was absent…I know God was there. I simply was not in a place where I could experience God’s presence as joy) Thankfully, one of the things that this period didn’t do was wear down my senses. In the last week or so I could sense a reawakening of my spirit. I was emerging from this barren time as the first gentle drops of autumn rain fell in my life. The dry and thirsty soil of my spirit came back to life.

The dry washes in my life were laying in wait for the torrent of water that was about to barrel through. These washes were unable to fulfill their primary purpose of facilitating the movement of grace through my life. They lay in wait unable to generate by sheer force of will the grace that would move through them. Though the falling rain of God’s grace was felt first as small drops in my life, above me, just out of my sense it was raining buckets and cascading down. The flood gates of God’s ever presence had opened up, my parched spirit was satisfied and what had just a few days ago felt stagnate has now roared to life. Today I sense with renewed clarity the power of God’s Spirit blowing through my life. I’ve learned to appreciate the barren time, even though it had its feeling of heartache and separation. That barren time was a time of preparation for what God is bringing next in my life, my spirit and my ministry.

Be prepared, hold onto hope, if you can identify one of these dry washes in your life where grace may have once freely flowed, it will flow again. Even it seems now that you are in an intractable drought, droughts don’t last for ever. Just as the rains eventually come, so too will God’s grace. Your spirit will spring to life once more and your life will be renewed.