What Grows in Weary Lands

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Discovery in the Desert

lost and found in a weary land

I.

Though we experience this differently, all of us hit points in our lives where we’re out of steam, where we can’t get traction, where we feel lifeless or tired, disoriented and unsure of ourselves. Things seem hard, maybe harder than we think they should be.

Paul wrote to the early church in Galatia urging them to “not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” But he would not have needed to issue this reminder if the course of life—­even a life of faith—­did not often make us weary. If the Christian life were meant to feel like a perpetual rock concert or an ecstatic mystical journey, if it was not difficult to pray or believe or obey God, the apostle would not have had to encourage us to keep going, to not give up. Instead, he implies that doing good—­that staying true to the commitments of our lives—­costs us something.

In the past few years, I found myself in something akin to a spiritual drought or a desert, yearning for rain, for renewal. I did not know how to name what I was experiencing. It was not a time of tragedy or deepest suffering, but neither was I flourishing. To call it a midlife crisis feels too dismissive and cliché. There was no plastic surgery or Botox. I didn’t run off with some charming stranger I’d met in a hot yoga class or “find myself” in some exotic locale. This was a quiet crisis, as inarticulable as it was unignorable. And it touched nearly every realm of my life.

I had written for The New York Times every week for two years. I’d published tens of thousands of words about the value of faith in public discourse and private life. And I had believed them, every word. But my actual faith—­my connection to God in a typical day—­felt wavering. God began to seem less like a kind, present friend and more like a corpse on a table that we, like medical examiners, analyzed and debated in the comment sections of my articles. Less like a being of overwhelming beauty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and more of a sociological artifact used to track American voting blocs.

Prayer grew halting and frustrating. I would sit to pray, but it felt as though the line had gone dead. I did not feel a sense of God’s nearness. I didn’t feel much of anything at all. And I’d begin to think, Is anyone there? Am I fooling myself? Is this a waste of my time?

At work, I met deadlines. I got positive feedback. But I had lost much of the initial joy I’d had when I first became a writer. Once words flowed from me, feeling electric, urgent, and at times ecstatic. Now my mind meandered and froze. I’d write a sentence and delete it. I’d stare at the empty page. Then came a heaviness in my limbs, a sighing in the soul. Sometimes I’d get up from my desk, lower myself onto the floor, and weakly moan, thinking about how my once beloved work now felt like pushing a boulder up a hill—­punishing and pointless. Like Sisyphus, if he were under deadline. I’d stare at the ceiling and wonder, Am I just being lazy? Am I a fraud? Is it time to give up?

It seemed I was always worrying over something or other. The online critics, whose voices echoed in my head like some kind of demon parrot who only knew insults. Or the headlines that blared on my news feed. Or the feuding state of the American church. Or my slowing metabolism and sudden appearance of gray hair, which my youngest daughter had kindly begun referring to as my “tinsel.”

I wasn’t sure anymore who I was, where I was in life, or how to keep going. I was disoriented.

At the same time, I felt overwhelmingly and unavoidably busy, sandwiched between kids—­a preschooler, a tween, and a teen—­and an aging mother who, for over a decade, had drifted slowly into the fog of Alzheimer’s. They needed me, all in vastly different ways. My husband needed me. Friends needed me. The dog needed me. The church needed me. The chores and bills needed me. I, on the other hand, wanted to crawl into a cave and hide from it all for a few weeks or years or decades.

I had grown weary. But I wasn’t sure what to do next.

In the midst of this season, on one ordinary day, my husband Jonathan and I had been low-­key squabbling on and off for hours, both feeling crabby. I was tired after a bad night of sleep. Writing that day had felt like a failure, and I’d gotten a discouraging comment from a colleague. I had not used my time well and felt wired and addled from being plugged in to distant sorrows and debates online all day. And as the sun set, my daughter and I got in an ­argument—­I don’t even recall about what.

And I’d had it. The walls were closing in on me. I grabbed the car keys, slammed the door, and sped down the street. But where was I to go? I had no idea. So I just drove around, the anger in my chest melting into hot tears until I couldn’t see the road anymore. I pulled into an empty Barnes & Noble parking lot, turned off the engine, and wept as I wailed six words that I’ve since yelled at God a hundred more times: “I don’t know what to do!”

Silence. There was no voice speaking back, no flash of insight or clarity, no “heart strangely warmed.” After a long while, my tears slowed, my breathing steadied, and I drove back home.

In some ways, it’s a stupid story to share—­so common it doesn’t feel worth writing about. The headline would never go viral: “Middle-­Aged White Lady Drives to Strip Center Parking Lot, Cries.”

What would have made it worth telling is if I’d kept driving, escaped to Mexico, had an epic adventure, and discovered some zingy new spirituality. Or if I’d walked into the Barnes & Noble, stole something, and slowly broken bad into a life of crime. Or if I’d stopped somewhere to drown my sorrows, bumped into an old flame, and we both realized that everything in the last twenty years had led us to this very moment, together at last. All of that would make good fodder for a memoir. I could spin it all to sound courageous, deep, and original. I would tell how I invented my own path and learned to embrace radical self-­love. It would be romantic, passionate, and possibly lucrative.

Instead, I just drove home, with my face all puffy, to put the kids to bed, reconcile with my daughter and husband, and get some sleep. And in our moment in history, such an ending to this small story does not seem brave or profound or worthwhile. Because of this, we end up not telling the stories of these weary yet undramatic seasons—­unless those stories end in a total dismantling and re­invention of our lives.

It is vulnerable to talk about long seasons of unfulfillment and of spiritual, creative, and emotional dryness. We can feel as if we are simply being whiny or wimpy. We can tell ourselves we just need to get over it, stop moaning, cheer up. We can also fear that if something feels off or unsatisfying about our life, we must be doing it wrong. We must have made poor choices or forsaken the blissful path we were made for.

But because we don’t sit with these stories, we lack the resources to understand what is happening to us when these wearying seasons inevitably come. We miss what these times are meant to do in us, what they shift and grow within us, what they call forth from us, and where God may be in the midst of them. We miss the gifts they offer, gifts we desperately need if we are to flourish.