Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.
Isaiah 12:6 (NIV)
The Holy One Among You
Nothing in the foundry is louder than the first pour of the morning. The ladle tips, the stream runs into the mold, and the light coming off it turns every face in the hall toward the same place. Behind the rail, the new hires stand where the foreman put them. The heat reaches them a second after the light does and moves them back a step without any of them deciding to move. The one on the end has both hands over his ears. In the loudest room any of them will stand in this year, not one of them says a word.
Isaiah tells the people of Zion to shout and to sing, and he gives them a reason for it: great is the Holy One of Israel among you. The greatness he names is a person, and the person is standing in the middle of them. These are people who say God was angry with them and then turned his anger away and comforted them.
So the singing has a cause that isn’t the day it gets sung on. The command can arrive on a morning with nothing in it, and the greatness Isaiah names stays where it is while your mood moves around it. He gives them a fact about who is near, and the singing comes out of it.
Take it that way on the mornings you’d rather not sing. It was true before the morning started, and whatever the day turns out to hold won’t change it.
The ladle swings back empty and the color in the mold begins to dull. One of the new hires says he hadn’t expected it to be that color, and the man beside him says nobody ever does the first time.
A Prayer to Remember
You turned your anger away from Israel and comforted them, and they got a song out of it. I don’t have the song yet. Be as near to me as you were to them, and let me know it. If the gladness takes a while to catch up, I’ll wait for it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
