Advent Day 8.
The Desert,
Isaiah 35:1-10

Music:
In Quietness, Written and Performed by Luke Parker.
Be Still, Written and Performed by Simon Wester.
A New Deep, Written and Performed by Dear Gravity.


In 2008, while working in England, I had the opportunity to fly to The Gambia with a local school I worked with during my time in England.
During our Flight, we passed over the Western Sahara Desert. I have never felt so small as I did at that time. We flew over an endless desert for two hours with small villages seemingly placed randomly throughout. I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to find myself wandering in the desert. To be left to wander, looking for water and a place to find any shelter or life. It left me with a feeling of hopelessness.
When Isaiah penned the rivers in the desert poem, Judah was in a bad way.
Internally Judah was corrupt, and externally it was under threat of invasion. For years the nation had been wandering with no signs of hope, let alone any possibility of Joy
But as we have heard throughout the readings of Isaiah, the prophet who brings the message of hope does so even during the most toilsome times.
In this poem, the Joy of the Redeemed, we see Joy erupt from sorrow. In the midst of pain the promise that those in the desert will soon be glad.
Someday soon, Isaiah says, “you will see the glory of God”
When you are lost in the wilderness, sometimes the best thing you can do is stop and wait, even if waiting is the last thing that you want to do.
But that is what we do at advent, we wait. When we are lost and feel hopeless sometimes we will do almost anything to fill the void and make something happen, but we’re not very good at waiting—it feels too much like doing nothing. But it’s not doing nothing. As we wait, we slowly become contemplative enough to discern what God is doing. Unless we intentionally cultivate some contemplative slowness in our soul, it doesn’t matter if God acts, because we will most likely miss it.
When God entered humanity through Jesus many people who were supposed to understand the significance of the moment, missed the beauty of who had arrived in the manger. but the contemplatives like Simeon and Anna perceived the arrival of God’s salvation because they learned how to wait.
The deeper truth is that God is always acting because God is always loving his creation. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are always inviting us into their house of love.
As I thought about wandering in the desert, the possibility of being in a spiritual desert is much more real. This Advent, we wait for Jesus, the one who will open the eyes of the blind, open the ears of the deaf, and cause us to leap for joy.

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