“Forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do. For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.”
A single event cleaved my life in two. What had been a continuous life now consisted of two parts: before and after. Maybe you’ve experienced a similar watershed. Before the event you had one sort of life, and afterward you had a different sort entirely.
A cleaving experience involves loss. The before is gone, never to be regained. In the sort of paradox that language sometimes hints at, we cannot cleave to our before because our life has been cleaved into after. We can only go forward. In this circumstance, how is it possible to heed the voice of the prophet Isaiah? Can we trust that God will provide a pathway through the wilderness and water in the wasteland?
When I was the victim of trauma, my life became wilderness and wasteland. I believed that everything good about me had been ruined. All my freshness had been dried up. In fact, anything fresh seemed foolish and naive. My “after” self was tempted to despise my “before” self.
How could I be made new, as Isaiah says? I needed to reckon with my former self—to love her, but also to recognize that she had been forever cleaved from me. This involved journeying through grief. Eventually I found myself in a new place. This was not a full circle, simply returning to where I’d been, but a spiral. No longer founded on the naïveté of before or caught in the despair of after, my faith was newly confident in the goodness and love of God. How did I get there? The Spirit made the path.
Reflect
Read Isaiah 43:18–19. If you could give your life chapter titles, what would they be? Are some chapters before and other chapters after?
Pray
With God, prayerfully think through “before” or “after” experiences in your life. How has God journeyed with you through those experiences? How might God be at work creating a “new beginning?” Be attentive to God’s leading as you pray.
While we pray for peace, we need moral clarity about this war.
As my doubts about his teachings grew, so did a secret fascination with Jesus.
We must always be people of the Word, but we’ll have to reimagine deep engagement with Scripture.
