2026 Sacred Whispers Blog

“The wilderness… shall be glad for them; the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.  It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing…”

Isaiah 35:1-2

There are some seasons in life that don’t feel like gushing oases or lush spring gardens; they feel like wastelands: arid, dry, and deserted. They are like deep places inside of you where the sun never seems to set, where the heat never lets up, where hope feels like a long forgotten memory from a previous life.

You don’t have to stand in a sub-Saharan wilderness to know what a desert feels like. Some deserts show up unannounced and uninvited in your soul. A desert can be a diagnosis you weren’t ready to hear. A midnight phone call that shatters the ground beneath your feet. A long, painful silence from heaven that leaves you staring at your ceiling at 2 a.m., wondering if your prayers were ever heard, or even crossed the ears of God.

Yes, some deserts feel so barren that you almost stop praying, not because you don’t believe, but because you’re not sure your heart can handle another long night of silence.  Deserts are lonely. Deserts are long. Deserts seem to unrelentingly linger.

THE DESERT NO ONE CHOOSES

I remember a wife and a mother named Dorothy in the early years of my ministry who said to me through trembling lips, “Pastor, I didn’t walk slowly into this desert; I woke up in it.”  Her husband went into the hospital for a routine exam, and with no warning, no preparation, and no time to brace for a tragedy, he went into cardiac arrest on the examination table.  She looked at me with a blank stillness, almost as if she couldn’t believe the words she herself was about to say. She swallowed hard and then said, “He has been in an unresponsive coma ever since.”

I knew this family very well.  I went to college with one of their sons.  They were faithful and wonderful members of our church, and it was impossible to find a better man than her husband, even if you searched for the next hundred years.  They were an amazing couple and had built an amazing family.  And in one fell swoop… one moment suspended forever in history… one blink of an eye… everything changed.  They went from the lush garden of a rich and rewarding family life, to the dry desert of pain, fear, and hopelessness.  Deserts don’t come scheduled, and they don’t wait for invitations.  They come unannounced.

In my subsequent conversation with Dorothy, she said, “The days after felt like someone dropped me in the middle of a wilderness with no map, no compass, and no strength. Everything was dry. Even my tears felt dry.”  We all – her children, her neighbors, her church family – all of us, watched her for the next 8 years take care of her husband every day, while he lay in their home hospice care, unresponsive and unable to move.  She bathed him, fed him, talked to him, sat with him, and loved him for 8 long years, all while he was unable to respond or return any notion that he was aware of her presence.   The lessons she learned about God, faith, and her own internal strength could never be gained in a million classrooms or ever captured in a million sermons.  In a desert like this, prayer is not an abstract activity that you do without thinking; it is the fervent passion of a heart that leans upon God for your very next breath.  It is to come face-to-face with the stark reality of your own human weakness and cling to God, knowing that your life hangs in the balance.  There is no place for arrogance in deserts like this. No place for pride. No place for demands. Only quiet whispers for grace, and silent pleas for mercy.  

ISAIAH WRITES OF AN UNEXPECTED JOY

In Isaiah 35, what we are reading here is not so much a personal desert, but a national one. A people are taken in exile. Their homeland has been reduced to ruins, and their faith has been shaken to its core.

Isaiah calls this a desert. It certainly would not be a dramatic stretch to say that they have been devastated, disoriented, and drained of the very sap of life.  Everything they have known is gone.  No homes, no farms, no family, and for many, no faith. They believe their story is over. They believe God has turned the page and wrote the words “The End” right in the middle of their worst hour. For Israel, all the nations around them laugh and deride them because it appears that their God has forsaken them. This desert looks like it's their permanent and irreversible condition.

Much like Dorothy, they are left without answers or direction.  Which is why chapter 35 of Isaiah’s prophecy seems not to fit the historical scenario that Israel is experiencing.  Isaiah writes a chapter about “joy”!

Joy!? Who expects to read about joy when we are walking through the dry sands of a tragedy? This is illogical to our current condition and inconceivable to our most basic sensibilities.  But yet, this entire chapter is about ‘joy’.  Isaiah has the audacity, the holy, Spirit-filled audacity, to say:

“…even the desert shall rejoice and blossom.”

What a powerful thought. God has the power to make even our deserts rejoice!  Dry places blossom, and arid lands gush forth with roses and beautiful blooms.  When Isaiah describes what is happening here, he doesn’t point to a natural phenomenon, or some human-driven force of will, but he identifies the source of this unimaginable miracle as “the Glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God” (Isaiah 35:2).

Yes, God’s glory is the only thing that can turn the dry sands of our deepest despair into the bright blooms of our highest praise. Glory.  It’s not achieved in the enlightened rhetoric of our academic halls, nor is it experienced in the sacred halls of Gothic cathedrals.  God’s glory is only revealed in the quiet, peaceful, powerful prayers of a desperate soul.  When the lights are out, and the air is dry, and the tears are real, and the heart is broken, that sets the stage for the “Glory of the Lord” to transform our deserts into an oasis of joy. 

I can’t end Dorothy’s story without telling you that she experienced that kind of joy.  Right in the very soil that broke her, God gave her a joy that healed her.  I spoke to her in the middle of the 8 years, and each time she had an indescribable praise for God.  She never allowed the desert to defeat her.  She found a way to make her desert rejoice.  She didn’t complain, she praised.  She wasn’t bitter, she was blessed.  An unresponsive husband, a heavy burden of care, long nights of worry, yet every time I met her, this lady had the brightest smile, the tightest hug, and the most infectious spirit.  How can this be?  How do you get better in the midst of something so bitter? How do you sing Hallelujah when you are faced with something so hard?  One thought, and one thought only.  The Glory of God. 

A FLOWER BLOOMING WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG

God does not wait for better conditions to grow something beautiful. He plants joy where joy does not belong.  He reaps a harvest of peace even though seeds of pain were sown.  This is not man’s tenacity, or human persistence… this is the Glory of God.

The Hebrew word for “blossom” in Isaiah 35 carries the connotation of a sudden, unexpected burst of life. A flower pushing through impossible soil.  The unrelenting drive of a rose to live.  A bloom in the desert is not a sign of agricultural resilience. It is the evidence of Divine intervention.  Botanist and horticulturists literally have no explanation for it.  The soil simply doesn’t have the capacity to produce that kind of beauty.  But yet, the bloom still exists.  That flower, in a place that it doesn’t belong, is God saying, “I am still here. I have not forgotten you.” A bloom in a wasteland is God’s whisper in the sand: “This is not the end of your story” even though everything around you is screaming just the opposite.

Beloved, this kind of joy in a desert is the joy that survives the night, the joy that keeps breathing, the joy that refuses to die, even when the soil around it seems to say, “Nothing grows here.”  Make no mistake, this is not joy pretending that there is no desert, it’s just joy declaring that the desert can’t stop my joy-buds from blooming. 

This Joy I have,

The world didn’t give it to me.

The world didn’t give it,

And the world can’t take it away.

PRAYER

Lord, You see my wilderness. You see the parts of me that feel parched and brittle. You see the questions that lie unanswered like tumbleweeds blowing across the sand dunes of my heart.

I invite you to step into my desert today. Speak life over my dry places. Give water to the soil that has forgotten what rain feels like. Plant something beautiful where nothing has grown in years.

Let my life become the kind of testimony that whispers to others: “Even here… God makes all things new.”  In Jesus’ name, amen.

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE: FIND TODAY’S BLOOM

Take a moment today to look for one small sign of grace.  Something beautiful, something unexpected, something that shouldn’t be there but is.

Name it. Thank God for it. Hold it gently in your thoughts.

Let every tiny joy be a reminder that deserts do not last…