See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19 (NIV)
Water Before Anyone Asked
Out in the wasteland the jackals come down to drink. Isaiah says the wild animals honor God for it, the jackals and the owls, because a stream is running through country that never held one.
Everyone hearing this had lost the land and the temple and most of the story they told about themselves. They were a long way from home, in a country that was not theirs, with nothing in front of them that looked like God keeping a promise. He speaks to them anyway.
He starts with their memory. God tells them to stop going over the rescue at the sea, and he promises a road through open desert instead. That rescue was a path cut through the water with an army drowned in it, and he calls it finished business.
See, I am doing a new thing. The order is to look at it. See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up, and he asks why they do not perceive it. He names it too: a way in the wilderness, and streams in the wasteland. The people he’s asking are standing in front of the same flat horizon as yesterday, and the work is already breaking ground.
In dry country the first sign of water is a change in the color of the dirt, low down, where nothing above it has moved yet. You have to be looking at the ground to catch it. Watch the horizon instead and you can go a month without seeing a thing while the water comes up under your boots. God is telling them where to look.
He announced the new thing to people who had not called on him and had not wearied themselves for him. The road was already coming while they had nothing left to say to him.
He announced it while they were still silent toward him.
A Prayer to Remember
God, I stopped asking you about one thing a while back, and I couldn’t tell you the day I quit. I’m not sure I’d know new ground if I were standing on it. Show me enough of what you’re already doing to start me talking to you again, and let me find it while it is small.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
