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 A collective reflection on God’s grace and our chances for renewal Thursday, March 13, 2025 |
A new adventure every time Isaiah 43:19 For over ten years now I have been going with the Heartland women to AEI base camp in Almont, Colorado. It’s an adventure I look forward to every year. Every year, we pile in a car or a van, and before the sun rises, we set off across I-70 through Kansas farm towns and truck stops to camp before dinner that night. I have been on this trip multiple times. Enough to know where the good bathrooms are, and where the speed traps will get you. I’ve also been to AEI enough times to know the land. To know the names of the mountain ranges by sight, and to know that the trail running by the pond loops around to take you back towards camp. Every year, there is a summit or backpacking destination, and I’ve been on most of them. At this point, I should know where I am and when I will get there, but that’s the crazy thing about the adventures out there. They are never the same. I have summited Matchless Mountain three separate times. I’ve never taken the same trail. I couldn’t tell you how much longer if you asked, because I honestly don’t know. It’s what I have loved about the women’s adventure trip, it’s a new adventure every time. That is what I love about this verse. I particularly love the Message version, “Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? There it is! I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands…” There are two things I take from this verse at the moment. The first is this, “don’t keep going over old history.” Your adventure is new every day. Even a path you have been on multiple times doesn’t have to lead you to the same place. God is constantly doing something new in you, which alters how you walk and what paths you take. I take that to mean that sometimes it will feel like wandering. You can’t take an old path and get to a new place. There will be some times where it will feel disorienting. That disorientation is the second thing I take from this verse, and God’s question is in the middle: “Don’t you see it?” Honestly, in my brokenness, the answer is often no. Even when I feel closest to God I can feel like I’m wandering, and if I’m wandering then I can start to convince myself that I’m lost, even when I’m not. I picture God gesturing wildly at what I perceive as an aimless desert and saying “don’t you see it? I’ve made you a road, follow that river I’ve given you because we are going someplace new!” He’s inviting us into a new adventure every day. He’s not interested in our past, he’s not interested in where we’ve been. His promise every day is that he is doing something new. A new that includes us, but requires us to walk. With him. Every day. He is making you a way, in your desert, in your disorientation, and giving you something new. Don’t you see it? By Sarah Hahs Lent beckons us, a time for looking inward, a spiritual refresh. We’re asked to walk into the ‘desert’ with Jesus. It sounds empty, a wasteland, but it’s often in desert spaces that we can encounter God most clearly. Like Jesus’ forty days alone, we’re invited to shed the clutter of our lives and face what’s deep inside. This week’s reflections will delve into what the desert means in scripture and spiritual stories, how this time of seeming nothingness can actually be full of God’s giving, testing, and close connection. We’ll ponder how the desert, where things are scarce, shows us how much God really provides, and how being alone can make us see his constant presence. We invite you to let the ‘desert’ become a holy place for growing spiritually and encountering God. |
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