Learning from a Cactus

Plants are not my thing. While some people have a “green thumb”, mine is black. The only time I got closely acquainted with plants was when I was courting my wife. Back then, plants became my best friends — the flowering sort to be more specific.

I once cared for a small cactus. It was something I got while I was on vacation. I was living in a dormitory and I wanted to make the place a little bit homier. I placed it on my desk so that it will relax me while I was pouring over (or snoring over) my thick textbooks.

Now please understand my motto in a lot of things: “When all else fails, read the instructions.” During that time, I didn’t “read the instructions”. I didn’t think I needed to. How hard can it be to care for a cactus? So I sang to it, made sure it had lots of sun, and gave it water. Lots of water.

Things went well for a while. Until one day, my cactus just collapsed! I am not exaggerating. It just collapsed. When I looked closer, I realized what happened. Its tissue just melted away. Little did I know that it was turning hollow from within.

I wondered what happened to it so I decided it was time to “read the instructions”. I rushed to my gardening instructor, a.k.a. “mommy”, who told me that I shouldn’t have watered it every day. Cacti, I learned, are used to having very little water.

This made me wonder about the times in my life when it feels like the opposite of being watered daily — drought. I’m talking about the hard and uncomfortable times when a little “spiritual hydration” would be nice.

You see, I’m used to God “watering my soul” a lot. But there are times when the water comes not in torrents but in drops. And I sometimes wonder why the Lord allows such moments to happen.

Last year was one such time. I was done with my training, but I had a seven month period when I did not have a job. That was a very difficult time for me. But that was also a time when my friendship with the God deepened tremendously.

The Lord used that time of dryness to teach me a lot of lessons. And one of those was to depend more on him.

And when I learned to depend on him, even a drop from heaven was enough.