1. The Lord makes and takes us through hard times. Not just as punishment – although hard times are sometimes His way of getting our attention – but often times as preparation. It is easy to forget that there is a life after this one for which we are being prepared. It is easy to think that God is only preparing us for a future in this life. While all of our attention tends to be focused on what God is doing with us in these few years, He has something completely different in mind for us.

“Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.” C.S. Lewis

2. It’s being taken through the hard times and through the deep waters not just into them and being left there. It’s not living a life of no hard times and no deep waters but of seeing them as times where God is present in ways we would not recognize in any other way. It is difficult to imagine the comfort of being held up by the everlasting arms in the good times. We don’t pray for hard times to have a special revelation of God to spend on ourselves but we experience the presence of God through adversity and affliction.

When we come to the end of ourselves we begin to understand what God says earlier in this chapter:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.”

I’ve shared with you before the mixed blessing of looking at the photos from the Hubble telescope. While they only affirm the indescribable expanse of God’s creativity and the beauty of the universe, it is easy to begin to think of God as so vast that it would be impossible for Him to care about one feeble creature whose life is but a speck and a moment. It is hard to imagine a God who is actually present. I like the way Frederick Buechner puts it:

“For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.”

In a sense, I understand the presence of God – over and above the physics of God – when I begin to practice His presence in the lives of others. We all know the book “Practicing The Presence of God” by Brother Andrew but practicing God’s presence in the lives of others is different than realizing His presence in ours.

Here is how Henri Nouwen puts it in “The Ministry of Presence”:

“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.”

Could it be that God does the same? It is hard to imagine God simply sitting with us and not speaking a word or not taking the opportunity to teach us something or not being busy. Is it possible that God could be still Himself? Could He be quiet with us and allow us to be quiet with Him? I think so.

3. There is a new book out on the prayer journals of the great Catholic Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor. She contracted lupus early in her life and died at 39. In her journal she writes about her desire to be a great writer – not for herself but as a testament to God. The reviewer asked the question, “Without this terrible narrowing-down, would she have achieved the greatness she prayed for?”

I have a close friend who suddenly came down with transverse myelitis – and went from being an active person to being almost totally paralyzed in less than 15 minutes. It’s been four months now with very little recovery and his life has experienced a terrible narrowing-down.

That is what the bread of adversity and water of affliction can mean in our lives. It is those times when we are reduced to the basics – bread and water. It is those times of daily struggle when the focus of our lives is not on the eternal or even the extended future but on today.

It is in these times that God is with us in such a unique way. The way Isaiah writes it is saying, “He himself is present”. It’s like saying “He, who He really is” will be with you in a way you could not have known otherwise.

But, in addition, it says He who He really is will teach you who you really are. Those two connect at a level that is far deeper than a superficial relationship. Who He really is makes contact with who I really am when everything else has been taken away.

We’ve talked before about the nature of a batholith. It is the exposed igneous rock that is left standing when everything that covered it up is eroded away. It is the way Scripture describes perseverance. That which remains.

4. And then this curious phrase, “your teachers will be hidden no more. With your own eyes you will see them.” In other words, God will be revealed to you. He will not be hidden.

There is an ancient Jewish saying, “When the time is right the teacher will come.” I’ve always thought that was true. We call it the “teachable moment”. We realize we have been surrounded by teachers and wisdom but we were not ready for it or it was invisible to us because we were caught up in other things. The time was not right but then the time comes and we are completely awake to it.

It’s one of the pleasure of getting older because I can see how many teachers were put into my life. I wrote a blog this week about a young man visiting my office and making the comment about how many of the photographs in my office are of me with older men. It’s true and it is those men who have showed up and been made visible at just the right times in my life. However, it is not just in the past. Even now, I discover wisdom all the time through people and writers who have been present all along but are just becoming visible now. I’m thinking about Wendell Berry and Flannery O’Connor and Oswald Chambers who have been there all along but who have become visible over the last several years. A French writer said, “It is the tree that grows the slowest that bears the best fruit.” I think he may be right. Do you know the mangosteen tree? It takes fifteen years to produce fruit. Do you ever feel that way? In some ways it has taken us a lifetime of experiences and teachers to produce fruit. Even though we want to be more like an apple tree that can produce fruit after a year or two, we are more like the mangosteen. It’s well known that vines that are not stressed to the edge of their tolerance will not produce the best grapes. Perhaps it is the same in ours. We need the bread of adversity and the water of affliction. We need time.

We also have to remember that our role is to share the fruit that has taken years to produce. The tree doesn’t eat the fruit. Sometimes we share apples and sometimes we share mangosteens. I met a young man in Florida this week that reminded me of that. He wanted apples – bushels of them – and had no idea what it meant to wait fifteen years for a particular kind of experience. When we talked about devoting decades of his life to something I could see him saying to himself, “But I want apples…and I want them now.”

5. “This is the way; walk in it.”

Sometimes we wander and sometimes we drift. All who wander are not lost and all who drift are not doomed. We all do it from time to time. Mostly we do it because we get out of the habit of walking along the path daily. Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives.” She is right. The word for “way” here means more than a path or a narrow lane. It means, literally, customs that are good. It means those things we share with other people and the things we do in common – not grand visions of our own. Not always exciting but necessary. It means routines…and many of us do not like the routines of life or what Oswald Chambers calls the ordinariness of the Christian life. “We do not need the grace of God to withstand crises—human nature and pride are sufficient for us to face the stress and strain magnificently. But it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of every day as a saint, going through drudgery, and living an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God—but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life, and holy on the ordinary streets, among ordinary people—and this is not learned in five minutes.” This is a life of walking in the way.

6. Perhaps that is also what Isaiah means by “you will hear a voice behind you.” Sometimes God leads from the front – like His taking the children of Israel out of Egypt. He led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Sometimes He leads from behind us. He leads by reminding us. He leads by saying, “Remember”. How many times in the Old Testament does God tell the people to remember? Hundreds. It’s not something we do easily because we are always so future focused and remembering when God was faithful is hard to do when you are thinking about His being faithful right now or sometime in the future. But it is that voice from behind us that reminds us of the way we are to walk forward. It is a voice that often quietly checks us if we begin to drift or walk toward danger. We don’t need to hear the voice all the time to walk in the right direction. We don’t need to live in fear of straying an inch off. The path is not a minefield and God is not a harsh perfectionist.

Sometimes the shepherd walks in front of the sheep and sometimes he walks behind and it is the same with us. We want to see God in front of us. We want to follow what we can see. But there are times when He leads from behind and we cannot see. We can only hear…and keep walking. Again, I think He leads more from behind as we get older. We walk not by sight but by faith. We walk by our trust in the sound of His voice and by remembering His faithfulness.

7. Finally, some of us are in hard times right now. It’s a daily struggle with little or no relief in sight. We have experienced that “terrible narrowing-down.” We need encouragement and the presence of God, the revelation of teachers and the companionship of others who are on the way with us.

Some of us are in good times and we need to be the encouragers. We need to share what we have learned and to learn ourselves to practice the ministry of presence. We don’t need to be problem solvers but to be a hand on the shoulder or to simply write a note.

Some of us need to be with a God who Himself is still. The God of the everlasting arms. The God of quietness and rest.

Some of us need to see a God we can follow and some of us need the calm voice from behind as a reminder to keep going in the way.

Some of us have gotten off on our own to pursue our own grand visions and forgotten the ordinariness of routines and living with flawed and ordinary people.

Some of us are stressed and have lost sight of what that can produce.

Some of us are wanting apples and are impatient with waiting.

Wherever we are He is present. He is not distant. He is with us.

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain