Flowers in the Desert

Someone asked me the other day what's happening in my ministry, my response was "not a whole lot right now." But God has been quick to step in and recall what the last year has been like for me...

I started this ministry one year ago, officially. The summer was filled with outrageous God moments that had my head spinning! In August I started in grad school. Life was grand. In Oct I learned of a situation that set everything spinning out of control and by December I felt like I was breaking. I left grad school and came close to leaving everything, even quitting God...I had entered the desert.

In January I went to the Dominican Republic (a trip planned four months prior) on a women's missions trip and spoke to over 200 women about breaking from the cycle of victim...the flower in that desert.

In February, I ended a long time friendship and felt the dryness of the desert creeping back in again. It seemed that every area of my life was a battle and I wasn't sure if I was winning. In March my computer crashed; two months later I've made three more trips to best buy due to computer junk. As a writer, the desert was starting to swallow me.

I don't know if you've ever been to the desert; there's something powerful by seeing the vastness of dry land and something so moving when you see a flower blooming in the middle of all of that. But you have to search to find those flowers sometimes, they can be so easily overlooked in comparison to what's around it.

This last year has been a year of desert, a year testing and growing...sprinkled with flowers. So, if you ask me what's going on in my ministry now, chances are the answer will be much different, because a LOT has been going on! God is at work, raising flowers in the desert...long before we see the first bloom.