There’s something magical about cruising on a motorcycle on the open road: the tenacious roar of the engine; the hot tarmac unfurling in your rear-view mirrors; the closeness of the world around you; the smells, the sights, and the sounds unhindered by the cage of a car; further accentuated by the feeling of being untethered, uncontactable, untouchable.
In the Goldfields there’s a rugged romanticism to the land. Orange-red plains dotted with low lying bush and scrub, scratched with shallow valleys and jutted with rocky hillocks. Flashes of silver between the trees catch your eye, and as the bush clears you see it’s a salt-lake, stretching and shimmering and sizzling in the hot sun.
The occasional road train approaches languid and lolling until it is suddenly upon you, thundering past in a murderous blizzard of metal and glass, the angry squall in its wake pounding you furiously in the chest. Mostly though, it’s just you, and there’s stretches where you feel like the only person in the world, and it’s all there just for you, a breathtaking juxtaposition of scrub and wild flowers; copses of trees and corpses of roos; dried-up lakes and luscious water-holes.
The sun is blistering hot. I keep having to pull over to the road side, remove my gloves, and jot down the thoughts and impressions I get from God as I ride, as I listen, as I focus my attention on His Spirit. It’s so hot here, you sweat through your clothes in minutes when you stop, but it cools you as you take off again. Authentic evaporative cooling.
Everything here is extreme. The weather, the landscape, the lifestyles. You either win or get beaten. You either struggle for survival or get swallowed up in opportunities. It’s the place where people converge from all over the country and the world seeking wealth, to get ahead, to carve out a fortune for themselves.
But the desert life also offers a very different kind of wealth, an eternal wealth, one that can’t rot or rust. Jesus withdrew to the desert. Paul withdrew to the desert. There’s something special that God can do with you when you separate yourself for a time. I came for two years and have now more than doubled that. I came seeking gold but found God. I went from finance to teaching to preaching. I went from moral-wrestling to Christ-resting.
I went from having a spirit of despair to a spirit of joy. I went from being a child of the world to being a child of God; from wandering aimlessly though life to walking in an anointed preordained destiny.
Sound extreme? It is. We have an extreme God. You only have to look around at His creation to understand that. We have a lavish, creative, passionate God who delights in his creation – including you. You have a God who created you for a purpose, and who has a hope and future for you – one that fits like a glove because it’s the life you were actually made for. You are not an accident; you are designed, flaws and all, for a purpose. Search for God, not gold; only He can set you free.
Once you submit to this, you don’t have to blunder your way blindly though life anymore, thrown about this way and that by the malevolent forces of money, status, or power. You go from wrestling with your destiny to resting in it. You discover that true happiness isn’t something you can pursue, it’s something that settles upon you when you’re doing what you’re designed to do. One that cannot be taken from you by the wiles of disease, divorce, or even death. To settle for anything less is to sabotage your own joy.
You don’t have to be in a desert to find God, but if he can take me from the Goldfields to the Godfields, he can find you wherever you are reading this.
