OF REEDS & WICKS

This isn't wheat (it's lavender) but just imagine
it to be wheat, for the sake of this blog!

 As the political scene starts heating up with Presidential hopefuls, we're apt to witness a lot of shaming and bravado. “My opponent is a loser.” “Here's some dirt I dug up on him/her.” “I'm better qualified because of this-and-that.” “I can be trusted.” Such propaganda (practiced in everyday situations besides the political arena) prompts me to remember a little passage in Isaiah's prophecy that's easy to skip over.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations.(Isaiah 42:2)

Unlike most rulers of that era, who wanted thrones, opulent living quarters, adoration, and the best horse in the stable to ride, Isaiah looked to a Messiah like this:

He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. (v.3)

Isaiah's ancient, agrarian audience understood these analogies. The spiritually broken and bruised were like a storm- or human-damaged crop stalk. The spiritually “burned out” could relate to a primitive oil lamp with its nearly spent oil basin and sputtering wick. In contrast to their era's proud and position-grabbing rulers, the future Messiah would teach of God's justice and reach the needs of the poor and suffering.

The phrase “a bruised reed” always fascinated me. Sometimes it brought to mind a mid-1950s family trip to my mother's aunt and uncle's farm in Eastern Montana. Think: windmill pump for water, an outhouse, and wood-stove/kerosene lanterns if a wild storm knocked out electricity. Big changes for a little kid from Los Angeles!

During the trip, my mother wanted to photograph her uncle in his prize wheat field. Although a bit reluctant—perhaps not wanting to waste some beaded wheat stalks by walking over them--he obliged her. I was reminded of this incident in reading Judith Couchman's One Holy Passion (Waterbrook, 1998, p. 84). Of the same Isaiah passage she wrote:

To be spiritually useful to God we must periodically travel the wasteland of brokenness. In this desert God tenderly picks up our shattered pieces and remolds them into the image of His Son. During the redesign He promises, “A bruised reed [I] will not snuff out”....No matter how broken we feel, God won't allow the pain to destroy us.

Jesus takes special note of bruised and sputtering lives. When I feel broken or burned out in my spiritual life, He is able to gently pick me up and help me get going again. When I languish, He waits in love for me to reach out or turn around and see Him, Ready, waiting, loving.

Does that encourage you in your hard times? It does, me.

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Broken up is hard to be....

Icy driveway--see tire tracks at left

Snow on top of sleet, on top of more snow and sleet, left us with an ice skating rink for a driveway a few weeks ago. The immediate solution was the tedious one: slamming a shovel into the ice to break it up. As I was taking my aggressions out on the slab of ice, of all things, some old pop song lyrics came to mind: “Breaking up is hard to do.” They came from Neil Sedaka’s 1962 #1 hit (for one week) titled, “Don’t Take Your Love Away From Me.” I was a high school freshman that year, more interested in classical music than the current pop tune, but somehow  random exposures to that era’s pop culture found a niche in my brain. Technology that was a pipe dream fifty years ago allowed me to “google” it and hear the whole song (with a grainy black-and-white video) on Youtube.  Oh my, how times have changed. The singer was nicely groomed in pants and a sweater. Behind him, modestly “grooving” to the music, were young men in suits and girls wearing dresses or skirts and blouses! 

THE RING WAS THE THING...
Those were the days, when it was big to “go steady,” which a girl announced to her world by wearing a guy’s class ring on a neck chain. Eventually, there was the inevitable “breaking up” and returning of the ring. Somehow, as an academia nut with no boyfriends, I missed all that adolescent trauma. But as I emerged into adulthood and found my spiritual moorings in truly embracing Jesus as my Savior, I discovered a deeper, more transforming “breaking up.”  It’s what God does in our lives to take us away from shallow and worthless things and into a deep and abiding love relationship with Him.

If you haven’t guessed, I am a reader, with three to five books going at a time. Recently I read Henri  J.M. Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, commended as “must read” by another book “in process” on my pile, one by George Verwer, founder of the world-wide mission outreach “Operation Mobilization.” Nouwen found himself in dialog with a discouraged secular Jew who questioned the value of any religion.  Out of that came Nouwen’s insight that brokenness can be a gateway to joy when we realize it carries the opportunity to purify and deepen God’s blessing on us. The apostle James said the same thing: to consider testings of our faith as “pure joy” because these are part of the maturing of our faith (James 1:2-4).  In other words, to rejoice in brokenness because it prepares the way for a deeper faith.

To return to that pop song of half a century ago, but with a spiritual angle, getting “broken up” is hard to go through. But it’s how God woos us from the “crush” or love of the world’s slippery values to bring us for our true love and Savior, Jesus.