One Sunday night while I was trying to fall asleep, I was thinking about the desert and what it meant to me. The thing is, I’ve grown up in a desert and have spent my life exploring it. I feel comfortable there, I feel like I know it well and sometimes I have a hard time drawing new meaning from something that I know well. But then something came to me, the scarceness of the desert can still sustain life. In the harshest conditions, where it seems like nothing could survive, something does. Every desert on the Earth has a diverse ecosystem that it supports, no matter how dire the landscape may be. For example, the picture for this article was taken in one of the slot canyons in Coyote Gulch, just outside the Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness Area. This is the longest slot canyon in the southwestern United States; there is limited wildlife because of the harsh landscape. Yet, this little cacti survives. No matter how much water floods the area, no matter how bad the ground is to grow in (sand is a very hard soil to grow plants in, and this area is quite sandy), no matter the little amount of sunlight this little guy gets, it still continues to grow.
See the Cactus, Be the Cactus
I feel like in our most dire circumstances, we are like the little cacti. We can have everything go wrong, hit every bump in the road, have every roadblock come up, but we can still find ways to grow. When we are in our life’s deserts, sometimes it can seem really bleak. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like we should be able to grow, like there are so many things going against us that all we can do is try to survive. These are the situations that help us grow the most. The situations where we have the least help and the fewest resources make us the strongest.
This thinking brings me back to the desert. Some of God’s most beautiful creations dwell in the desert. They dwell in the harshest environments on the planet, in environments where it seems that their entire destiny is to die, they thrive. God sometimes puts us in these deserts. Of course, the plants that grow in lush tropical forests cannot survive in harsh deserts, but just like the plants in changing climates, we can adapt and evolve to survive. The desert can be an example to us on how to survive in our harshest situations. We can learn to not just survive but to thrive in our harshest moments. So in these trying times, I am encouraged by the little cacti that is surviving in the harshest conditions. I remember that I can be like that little cacti, that even in the most unlikely conditions, I can grow to become my best self.