It’s easy to read these three verses as one long command, a kind of highway construction checklist: make a straight road, make it level, fill in the ruts, even out the grade—and if you do all these things, God’s glory will be revealed.

I am not someone who really needs to be encouraged to stay alert. I’m already too alert. I already fear the worst.

Daaaaaaaamn. That is rough stuff.

This passage from Amos is part of a lesson from the daily office for the first Sunday of Advent.

“This is what resurrection looks like,” the priest said, by candlelight, at the Easter Vigil service. She described feeling like the “dry bones” we’d heard about in the passage from Ezekiel after her husband, mother, and father died all in the space of a couple of months.

Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt […]