We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:6 (NIV)
The Lord Laid It on Him
By ten the ward is quiet. The night nurse has eleven rooms and she does them in the same order, down the hall and back, with the same penlight she’s carried for years. She doesn’t wander off her route. In four, a man’s daughter has fallen asleep in the chair with her coat still on, and the nurse lays a blanket over her on the way past and keeps moving.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Sheep don’t leave in a group. They drift one at a time, each to whatever it happened to be looking at, and by evening a flock can be scattered across a hillside with no two of them in the same place. Each of us has turned to our own way, says Isaiah, and every one of those ways is a separate way. Nobody wandered off in formation.
Then the direction changes, and God changes it. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Everything that went out in a hundred directions was gathered up and set down in one place, on one man, by the hand of the God who was wronged by it.
Today has nothing in it. Nothing gets announced and nothing arrives, and the work available is the kind the night nurse does, and it is to stay where you are and keep the round. Anyone who has sat up through a night like that knows how little it resembles faith while it’s going on. At three in the morning you’re not believing anything in particular. You’re watching a monitor and refilling a cup and listening for a change in the breathing.
The Lord laid it on him. Whether that does anything for a person sitting in a plastic chair at the end of a long night is a separate question, and today doesn’t require an answer to it.
She finishes the last room and writes up her notes standing at the counter, and the hallway is exactly as quiet as it was when she came on.
A Prayer to Remember
I turned off on my own, God, and I did it in small steps I could defend one at a time, and that is how I got so far out. You put the whole of it on him. Hold me still today. Let me wait through a day where nothing shows without concluding that nothing is true.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
