Filed under: Isaiah 40
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:28-31).
At first glance, it seems like Isaiah got it wrong. Shouldn’t life be a crescendo, starting with baby steps and ending with flying in the clouds, rather than the other way around? And yet, don’t we often begin various endeavors (relationships, jobs, blogs, hobbies, exercise programs, diets, resolutions) by soaring, with energy and enthusiasm and passion? And then we find ourselves descending, coming in for a landing, and we feel our feet slapping on the ground in a rhythm that is at first quick and awake and then, eventually, irregular, slow, and maybe even painful. All too often, I, like many others, have a hunger to soar all of the time, to constantly recapture the exhilaration of those flights with Christ, rather than accepting that sometimes, (maybe most of the time?) I simply need to walk, relying on Him to renew my strength. I’m hoping that this blog will be a travelogue of sorts, a record of ramble with Christ, and how I work out in my own life what it means to be one of his disciples. Because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this whole business of following him has infinite implications, from what I eat, to what I wear, to how I spend my free time and beyond. And while the business of putting one foot in front of the other is, on the one hand, beautifully simple, it can be, on the other hand, remarkably complicated, inconvenient, and painful. So that’s what this is about.
(I did not come to this epiphany about Isaiah 40 on my own. In a lecture that Steve Stockman gave about U2 at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, he explained the passage in this way and it immediately resonated with me.)
