The Desert Shall Bloom

My hen-and-chicks plants bloomed this year. Maybe you have seen them bloom, but if I did,  I must not have realized what it was.        

I raise cacti, African violets and other houseplants in addition to my outside gardening. Cacti or  succulents are very strange. (Cacti is the plural for cactus.) There are some varieties that look just like rocks, some covered with stickers. Some of them are downright ugly. Others actually look dead. You seldom see one in bloom, except on a rack in the store.

Isaiah 35:1 said “The desert shall blossom like a rose.” The desert, the wilderness, the barren waste, where only cacti grow, will blossom like a beautiful English rose garden. 

Cacti or other succulents store up all the moisture they can get, then use it up during the dry season. Sometimes the dry season will last for years. But the cacti, though barely alive, somehow manage to survive on a very limited amount of moisture. 

After one of these long stretches of drought, when the rains finally come, the cactus bursts into bloom using all its energy, sending forth its seeds just at the right time for them to sprout and reproduce. 

The “rain” of the Holy Spirit is here now. We have lived through hard times, barely surviving on just a little moisture, just enough to stay alive. Some of us are dead looking, thorny, ugly, but we have survived and now it is time to bloom. Jesus told us that the Holy Spirit will be like “ rivers of living water” pouring out of our innermost belly, John 7:38. 

Jesus has caused the airwaves, the magazines, the bookshelves to be flooded with His Spirit. There are more Christian books, songs, magazines, TV programs than ever before in the history of the world. The Internet has been taken over by the Christians. 

The drought has ended. The rains have come. What has God given you to do in this last-day “rain of the Holy Spirit”? It is time to get the Word of God out where it can reproduce.