Maybe your own brokenness will help you relate to the Israelites of old. Like you, they were in a place they didn’t want to be, held captive by adverse circumstances, enslaved in a strange land, and overwhelmed with dismay. When you were wrested from your safe environment, you may have reacted as they did, weeping over bittersweet memories: 

“Beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem.”
Psalm 137:1

They wept with longing—for home, for a normal life, for a way out. And they complained.

Perhaps your questions and complaints are similar to theirs. Didn’t God see their plight? Didn’t He care about their pain?… Where was He now?

Isaiah asked the Israelites a series of questions that would lead them to the answer. “Do you not know?… Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He [God] sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22).

In effect, he was saying, “You’re looking for God’s presence—apparently you’ve forgotten that He is here and has been since the earth came into being.” God has not forgotten you. He is not unaware of your suffering. He has not abandoned you…

Isaiah offered them the H of hope: Lift up your eyes…

In chapter I reflected on daughter Stacey’s death:

I was shattered. My prayers were moans… And yet, in that trupor of grief, God’s grace pulled my eyes upward, compelling me to hold them higher.

Tenaciously, without cooperative emotions or enlightened understanding, I forced my eyes to look to the heavens, to the One who created and ruled my personal world. It was there that the threat of despair was beaten back…

Hold your eyes higher than your earthbound problems and look at the One who is above it all—you will find hope. It worked for me, and it will work for you.*

Next week, we will step onto the “O” Path.

*Excerpted from I Was Broken, Too, chapters three and four.

Now available on Amazon: I Was Broken, Too: Four Paths to Restore Hope and Finding Hope: 65 Meditations for a Broken Heart

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay