Click on the links below for the Bible passages.
Isaiah (rather his followers) are
speaking to their people who have now been in exile for so long they
do not see anyway out. They have very little hope that things will
change and are feeling trapped in their current conditions.
Have you ever felt that way? Have you
felt that way about parts of your life, your work, or even your
church? Trapped, with no way out, with nothing discernible going on.
Just struggling to survive.
I know I have and so did the people
Isaiah is speaking to. Isaiah tells them in verse 18, "do not remember
the former things, or consider the things of old," yet in v. 16 and
17 he reminds us of the magnificent things that God has already done
– the major stories that all the faithful know and hold dear.
Is he telling us to forget our roots?
To leave behind what has made us who we are? Are we to pretend that
we don't view the world and the things that happen to us through the
eyes of one who has traveled in these shoes for a very long time,
through our experiences good and bad, our hopes, our fears, our
traumas and our desires. Reality is a fragile thing – it wraps
itself into our brain completely composed of what we see, feel, hear
and know combined with what we have experienced. Just ask someone
who has gone through an experience with you. It is so odd to talk
with my brother about childhood events. Our realities are so
different at times, yet we were both there at the same event at the same time - and our stories barely resemble each other.
Isaiah is reminding us that we can not get stuck in our realities. We can not continue to look longingly at the past. Isaiah is talking not just to the Jewish people but even for us today. We can not allow our
circumstances, our desserts, our wildernesses those spots that we
feel lost in, to trap us. If we allow it they will. We will keep
struggling for survival, our churches will continue to struggle for
survival, our jobs will continue to make us miserable if we keep
looking back at them and thinking of what we had and lost. If we
look at them and compare them to what we want and don't have, if we
look at them and think about the good old days without ever imagining
our horizons there will never be a path through our wilderness.
Isaiah reminds us that God is making
new things. New things spring forth and can be something that is
completely unexpected like a river in the desert or a road in the
wilderness. God is all about taking the least likely thing and
bringing it into a life that it could have never known by itself. Have you ever walked through an abandoned parking lot and caught site of the most beautiful flowers appearing out of broken pavement? That is true for us too.
When we surrender to God in these
difficult times, in the times when you see no way out. You never
know what you are going to get. It will be unexpected, it will be
ten fold more than you ever hoped for, and you may even be the one that is
helping someone else out of their desert. You just never know. That is the beauty of a new thing created by God.
We are reminded that we were formed in
God's image. WE are beloved! We are made to praise God. We are
being transformed if we accept the invitation God has given us to his
grace. Look at the objects that I have passed out (sand stone,
geodes, shells) If God can create something so beautiful from these,
what more can he do with us who are formed in his image. What fruit
can come from us if we allow these new things to spring forth and
open ourselves up to them? If we continue being stuck in the way it
was, what may have been, or how it should have been, we will only
see the desert. If we can find a way to praise God in where we are
in this moment we can begin to see a place for the new thing to
start. What can we praise God for today? Where have you seen God in
your desserts?
Paul saw this in Philippians 3:13 -
“Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this
one thing I do; forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to
what lies ahead.”
What lies ahead of you?
