{"id":227,"date":"2021-11-30T19:47:16","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T03:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/veragiles.com\/?p=227"},"modified":"2021-11-30T19:47:16","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T03:47:16","slug":"highway-to-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veragiles.com\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"Highway to God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Isaiah 40:3-5<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3 <\/sup>A voice cries out:
\u201cIn the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4\u00a0<\/sup>Every valley shall be lifted up,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and the rough places a plain.
5\u00a0<\/sup>Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and all people shall see it together,
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Luke first introduces John the Baptist in the third chapter of his Gospel, John is quoting these verses of Isaiah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Isaiah 40:1-2 (right before this passage), the prophet reports that God is telling Jerusalem that she has paid her dues\u2014in other words, that the Babylonians are leaving and the Israelites can come back from their captivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many who heard this quote coming out of John\u2019s mouth might have heard the implied context and decided he was also predicting the liberation of Jerusalem (in a way that wouldn\u2019t get him in trouble with any non-Jewish Romans, nudge nudge wink wink<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Jesus made it clear by the time he was crucified that he was not a military leader. So if the Messiah John was proclaiming wasn\u2019t there to liberate Jerusalem, what do the above quoted verses mean? And do they have any relevance to us now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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\u2014and if you do all these things, God\u2019s glory will be revealed. But actually, only the first verse is a command: \u201cIn the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.\u201d The rest is a prediction, more like, \u201cIf you build it, they will come,\u201d from the movie Field of Dreams<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness, everything will be turned on its head. Mountains will be leveled and valleys will rise up. Uneven places will be evened out and rough places will be flattened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I view this as a metaphor instead of a literal infrastructure assignment, I have to agree. When I feel like I\u2019m wandering in the wilderness, if I welcome God into my life, God has a habit of turning things topsy-turvy. Things I thought were really important turn out to be pretty silly, and things I hadn\u2019t been paying attention to turn out to be very important. Obstacles I thought were huge seem to melt away. Tasks I thought would be fun or worth my while sometimes become impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And verse 5 doesn\u2019t conclude, as you might after reading that paragraph, \u201cAnd boy is that gonna suck.\u201d (Whole lives turned upside down? That doesn\u2019t sound fun!) Instead, this will result in revealing God\u2019s glory. To everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people I know don\u2019t believe in God (or at least my flavor of God) and don\u2019t really know what God\u2019s glory would look like. I\u2019m not even sure what God\u2019s glory would look like myself. But here\u2019s an idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, I\u2019ve been wandering around in a creative drought for many months now. I\u2019m stalled halfway through revising the fourth draft of my memoir. I\u2019ve been doing all the right things\u2014talking to a therapist regularly and doing some really hard work around difficult events in my childhood, working with an executive coach to set and achieve priorities, trying to get medications and sleep and nutrition working as well as I can, getting regular acupuncture, signing up for a writing class with one of my favorite authors\u2026 you get the idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all should be working, right? It\u2019s not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally I\u2019ve thrown up my hands in despair, quit phone games cold turkey (because yes, it was really embarrassing how many hours a day I spent playing them, and I was actually addicted like alcoholics are to alcohol), looked at God, and said, \u201cDude. What the hell. I\u2019m miserable and I don\u2019t know why. Apparently whatever I was trying to do isn\u2019t working. So here\u2019s a highway into my heart. If you need me to give up the damn memoir, I will\u2014I mean, I\u2019m clearly not making any physical progress on it these days. Here you go. Come on in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

God did NOT send me a voice. Sometimes I really wish God would, but then again, if you read the prophets, having God\u2019s voice in your head and coming out of your mouth does not sound like a picnic. (If I ever doubt this, I have a great icon of Jonah that sets me straight.) Instead, God sent me a series of nudges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n