I’ve been through a rather rough season of late, which is why you haven’t seen me here. I was sick for the better part of 5 weeks. My dad is now in a nursing home due to his advanced Parkinson’s disease, and I have been trying to visit him weekly. Evan has been really struggling with seizures.
In the middle of a terrible week, I was praying through the “suffering” section of my prayers for special needs parents book. I came to Isaiah 43:16, and in that book, it is quoted in the New Living Translation. It says, “I am the Lord, who opened a way through the waters, making a dry path through the sea.” And I don’t know why, but that just struck me in a new way. Just the night before, I had been crying to my husband because I was so lonely. While studying that morning, this verse hit a chord with me. The same Lord who pushed back the Red Sea so His people could walk through on dry land was the God who was with me. I am not alone. The situations I find myself in are not hopeless. This season is not hopeless. God will always make a way when there seems to be no way.
Chapter 43 of Isaiah begins this way:
“Now this is what the Lord says — the one who created you, Jacob, and the one who formed you, Israel — “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and the rivers will not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, and the flame will not burn you.”
If you look at verse 2, He tells us He will be with us when we pass through the waters and the fire. It hit me that our country has been hit with both water and fire this year. We here have had the water. California and Colorado have had the fire. And I bet believers in both of these places could tell you how He has been with them. The waters have not overwhelmed. The fires have not scorched. Now they were probably both pretty terrifying at the time they were happening, but coming out on the other side, believers could say He has been with them.
All of us have been through it this year. We’ve all had something. No one has not been touched in some way. But can you testify of how He has been with you even in the hard times this year?
I read a devotional on this chapter of the Bible, and the title was, “The only way out is through.” We all want out of this year, but putting up the tree (which I am not against) and trying to rush Christmas is not going to get us out. We can’t skip these days. We can’t skip what God is trying to do in our own lives and in the world. Yes, it’s hard. It’s water and fire. He’s already said that. But He also said, “When you pass through..” That means we have to go through. “In this season, there is no around or over or under. There is only walking through with the Holy Spirit holding [our] hands the entire way.”[1] And once we are through it, there will be new. But we don’t get to pick when the new comes. We have to trust. We have to wait. We have to keep praying, keep seeking, keep being faithful. And that’s the hard part – especially on hard days when we want to give up. But walking through those hard days is what gives us the spiritual muscle we need to face whatever comes our way.
And on those hard days, we need to remember what God has said about us in these verses:
I created you.
Do not fear.
I have redeemed you.
I have called you by your name.
You are mine.
And then we keep on walking through.
So well stated and shared I think all of us need to hear, I know I did. As a Christian we all know this but being human when our knees buckle and we feel so empty it is reassuring to read or hear someone else remind us.
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