Part 1 of the Arabah project explores the landscape of empty promises, broken promises, and false promises. In time, many of the messages we receive in life fail to deliver. Many of the dreams we chased or the goals we pursued don’t fill us the way we thought they would. We come slowly, eventually to the realization that the things of this world cannot and, therefore, do not satisfy our deepest need. Yet the messages persist in our consciousness, faded and peeling as they may be, and continue to tempt us with false hope. Sanctification is a process.

Henri Nouwen writes “[the desert] is not a private therapeutic place. Rather it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies… and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and new woman occurs.”