Learning to Wait in Hope in Desert Places

Are you learning to wait in hope in the desert place of this crisis? Here in the desert, the saguaro is beginning to bloom, ushering the beginning of our summer. I love watching the creamy white blossoms appear on this gentle giants, first opening in the evening hours. There is something beautiful in the expression of hope arriving in darkness. Wait in hope, my friends. Wait in hope. This is a repost from desert adventures in 2019.

A saguaro ladened with three-inch creamy blossoms beckons me closer, but the fifteen-foot main portion of the giant makes taking photos of the flowers on the crown difficult.  I am not sure botanists would agree, but my unscientific surmising after years of hiking desert trails is that the saguaro waits to bloom last, after all the wildflowers and other cacti—after the golden poppies, the purple scorpionweed, and the yellow prickly pear. For me, the blooming of the saguaro signals the beginning of the end of spring and the arrival of desert summer.

I see another saguaro off the main trail and bend low under the yellow-flowered branches of a palo verde tree that guards the entrance of a desert wash. The paws of my rust-colored mutt, Mollie, barely sink into the loose sand, but my neon pink runners leave definitive imprints behind me. I can almost imagine we are the first to discover this side adventure on South Mountain until I almost step in a pile of horse manure.

Unsettled by our arrival, the warning cry of a Gambel’s quail breaks the silence of the early morning. With a whirrrrr of wings, the rest of the covey abandons a low mesquite bush for a higher outcropping of boulders. The plaintive call of a lone quail—a fledgling abandoned in the mesquite—rings out again and again, until Mollie’s curious nose encourages the young flyer to try out his wings and join the rest of the group.

I lean down for a whiff of a nearby bush covered in two-inch, cylindrical, yellow spikes. When I snap off a scented cluster, I feel the jab of a curved thorn and remember the plant’s name—catsclaw acacia (senegalia greggii). The Southwest Desert Flora website reports the flowers to be one of the most important nectar sources for honey bees in the desert, and the incessant buzzing of those pollinators supports the statement.

The dense thorns make the bush almost impossible to penetrate, giving the bush another name—the wait-a-minute bush. I can imagine cowhands driving cattle through the wash and having many unprintable complaints to make about the wait-a-minute bush that lacerates clothing and skin and forces a person to slow down.

Which is a good thing to consider in the changing of seasons, especially the arrival of desert summer. By a good thing, I mean, the slowing down, the pausing to wait. Romans 8:25 (ESV) says, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Under a giant saguaro that waits to bloom last and beside a scraggly bush that beckons for a minute, I pull out a granola bar and consider areas in my life where I need to wait for what I do not yet see and to do so with hope. I toss a cookie to Mollie and pray that others will find rest in the shade of my life as they join me in the waiting.

Fellow sojourner,

on your journey from here to there,

I pray

you discover hope in the waiting

and the shade you encounter

on side wanderings

covers you

for the length of a minute

or the distance of a saguaro.

Wait in hope.

This post recently appeared in the Ahwatukee Foothills News, The SanTan Sun News, and the East Valley Tribune.

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Do you need a whisper of hope today? Sometimes in the forgetting places of our lives, we need to be reminded to hang on with both hands.

Take heart. Please, take heart.

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ABOUT LYNNE HARTKE Lynne Hartke shares stories of courage, beauty, and belonging--belonging to family, to community, and to a loving God.  Lynne is the author of Under a Desert Sky: Redefining Hope, Beauty, and Faith in the Hardest Places. She is also the creator and teacher of the online writing workshop, Reclaim Your Scattered Story: a 6-week Online Writing Workshop for Those Touched by Cancer.