Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
The Middle You Cannot See
I keep coming back to that because of what it does to my sense of scale.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord." (Isaiah 55:8)
Four hundred years of silence, and God was building roads. Stay with what that does to your sense of scale. A faithful man in that period, praying every morning of his life for God to speak again, dies without hearing a word. His son prays and dies. His grandson prays and dies. Generation after generation of faithful people go into the ground with nothing in their hands, and every one of them, had you asked, would have told you God was not answering.
And he was laying roads under their feet the entire time. Roads that other men would one day walk down carrying news that the prayer had been answered so far beyond the asking that none of them could have imagined it. The silence was not God doing nothing. It was God doing something too large to be seen from inside a single lifetime.
This is not said to make anyone's grief smaller. It is said because we need it. You are standing in the middle of a story whose middle you cannot see, and the middle of a story is always the part that looks like failure. The silence you are in is not empty. It is only quiet. And the fact that you cannot hear the work does not mean the work has stopped. Trust the road being laid in the dark, and do not measure God by the little stretch of it your one life is allowed to see.