There’s Always a Desert Nearby

Late last night our family returned home after 17 full days in Mexico on the mission field. Grateful for the gift of serving alongside dear friends & family, and grateful, too, for the priceless feeling of coming home.

A few nights before we left, I walked into our cold, tiled bedroom at the end of the hall - lit only by a harsh blue light overhead, like most the rooms here - and stopped.

The dark room was glowing.

One tiny flame on the bedside table, strangely soothing. Helen had surprised me with a candle she’d found at a little store, and what a delightful little, big surprise it was after growing accustomed to warehouse lighting.

I keep coming back to that - it’s exactly how Benny’s place feels in the middle of the Chihuahua desert.

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Benny lives with his wife and daughter on a small plot of land in a vast Mennonite colony in rural Chihuahua, Mexico. It’s a harsh desert region which, a good year, receives maybe seven inches of rain. In bad years, almost none.

When he first moved there ten years ago, Benny decided to do what almost no one else was doing: plant dozens of trees, lawns, and beds of beautiful flowers around the small home he’d built. Then he waited, and watered. And watered some more.

When you pull up the area on Google Earth, Benny’s place stands out instantly - from a long ways up. Encompassed by gray, boxy concrete homes, his little plot is a literal oasis.

Behind the house, he planted a garden. A flourishing one. The past several seasons, they sold fresh, organic produce to neighbors.

Mennonite culture is extremely industrious, efficient, and prosperous - but beauty has rarely been the priority :) Benny’s place is an exception. Not just in the “hardware,” but also the “software” - the hospitality & community. The gift of welcoming and caring for people runs bone deep in this household. (He’s also a top-notch chef who spoils us with his local special - grilled Picaña and pineapple, peppers, and onions - whenever we’re in town.)

Over the past couple years, the Dueck’s generosity has blossomed into the beginnings of a beautiful community - a group of families working, worship, and serving together. Another living example of the power of place I wrote about in my essay last week.

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Last April, Benny attended a talk I gave on the opportunity to create farm stays, and something sparked.

He drove home, tore up his entire garden and backyard, and started looking. He knew exactly what he wanted, and about a week later, he found it: one of the old adobe & wood farmhouses built by the Mennonites when they first arrived in this desert, exiled from Canada a century ago, with trees on their wagons to build new homes and lives.

This one was days from being demolished. The owner had planned another subdivision and wanted it gone.

$1,000 later, it became Benny’s, crumbling and decrepit.

He carefully removed the adobe bricks from the inside, one by one. Then, when we were here last August, he moved the old rickety house a few miles to his property. Over the months since, with his own hands and the help of a few friends, he’s been carefully restoring it. New plumbing, electrical, and A/C, while honoring every original timber the desert climate had quietly preserved.

He even saved the old mud bricks and plans to use them on the root cellar he’s dug to keep the harvest.

When we visited this trip, the progress was awesome. A wraparound porch, root cellar dug and ready, concrete garden wall built to be overtaken by vines, greenhouse site underway. In a few weeks, an orchard will be planted, and the garden lovingly replanted. It’s going to be one whole, working, beautiful homestead again.

What a story.

Yes, it’s another example of buying something forgotten for pennies on the dollar and breathing life back into it - adding a boatload of personal and economic value. But more than anything, I love the fearlessness. Benny hadn’t done much construction, didn’t have the money to start himself, and had no experience with this kind of hospitality.

Those were no barriers for Benny. He sold the idea to friends who agreed to loan the money, bought a hammer, and started figuring it out.

He’s a man of action because he cares. And I believe the hospitality he’ll serve won’t just give guests a beautiful, one-of-a-kind place to stay. It will inspire them to imagine more for their own lives, families, and communities - to honor their own history, whatever it might be.

That’s the real gift. Great hospitality multiplies and ripples out. Already, people for miles around can’t stop talking about the project. They’ve never seen anything like it.

And it all started a decade ago, when Benny quietly rebelled against what was normal and planted a bunch of water-loving trees in the middle of a parched, concrete desert.

An oasis is sometimes a garden where one shouldn’t exist, sometimes a home-cooked meal served freely, and sometimes just a candle on a bedside table, lit by someone who cares.

There’s always a desert nearby. Look for yours. That’s the opportunity. Be like Benny - or Helen :)