Comfort for the Wilderness
It was a land barren, desolate, nearly without life…needing comfort. Many places that could be described as desolate are at least beautiful, colorful, or interesting. This was a waste-land: flat, sparse, featureless, dry, dull-looking.
This was a place we just wanted to get through as we traveled over 4500 miles to Minnesota and back for our grandson’s wedding. It was the kind of place that invites no one. There were no cattle, no windmills, no trace of human existence except the ribbon of blacktop that stretched before us. This would be terrible to have a breakdown here.
Thankfully we made it through without incident, but this landscape was what sprang to mind when I read in Isaiah 51 this promise that God makes to Zion: “He comforts all her waste places.” This passage has been my companion for several years now. The first time I received it was in 2022. These words have followed me since then, many times repeated. Since, as those who trust in the work of Jesus on our behalf, we are grafted in, and included in the City of God (aka Zion), these words apply …on so many levels.
At first it was the barren wasteland of my backyard, where we had decommissioned the swimming pool and filled it with the dirt from someone else’s pool dig. Subsoil. Barren, nutrient-deficient, suitable for making pottery! I understood God’s promise to mean that He would help me to grow things for food and beauty in that desolate space. And He did. It is still a work in progress, but it is no longer barren; just ask the people who have a jar of my fig pickles in their pantry.
The next time I received this word, the chaotic wilderness of “stuff” that needed to be put away, given away or trashed appeared before me. I understood the words to mean He intended to restore order to our chaos and break off the chains of bondage to the spirit of chaos under which we labor. We took authority over the chaos…and still we struggle, but the strife and despair the mess generated has lessened considerably, and we have hope of change. And I can find most of the counters in the kitchen! It is still a struggle, a daily battle.
This time when I got this scripture handed to me, I chuckled.
“Now what? God, what are you after this time?”
This time it is the wilderness in me…those barren wastelands of loss and sorrow I just want to drive through and hope there’s no breakdown along the way. It would be a long walk to get help. These are the places that are flat, sparse, featureless, dry and dull-looking, and probably with hidden pits and canyons, not much evidence of life. These are the places in me where I seem to be more trouble than I’m worth, places I just want to get through or go around.
Now it might be helpful for you to know that one of the things God has designed me for is restoring beauty in the wake of destruction. I now face the devastation that I have carried with me for decades. My instructions are, “Plant the flowers of hope and restoration in the wake of your own devastation.”
How?
By clinging to His promise. He is “the LORD [who] comforts Zion; He comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the LORD.”
I gotta tell you, I am looking forward to that (It’s a desert in here.) and the rest of the promise:
“Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”
I am waiting for more of that promise as I am working and
Following Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
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