The Straight Highway
Isaiah 40:1-8
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
I want to go home.
If you’ve ever been far from home, felt lost or trapped in the wrong place, you know how the people of Israel felt in exile. They want to go home, back to Jerusalem, back to their way of life. Isaiah has a word from the Lord for these exiles, and it is a construction plan. They are to build a straight highway “for our God.” This isn’t the highway they want to build. They’re more interested in building “a highway for us”—to hightail it out of here.
Isaiah knows that the little Jewish remnant in Babylon is no match for the mighty army of their captors. They can’t build a highway out. But they can build a highway in, a straight path for God to reach them. And with God, nothing is impossible.
The exiles in Babylon have a classic case of the “geographical cure,” the belief that our problems can be solved by moving to a new place. God knows they must somehow be able to find home, even in this strange land. Unless we can find a place within us where we are safe and secure in the love and blessing of God—no matter what else is raging around us—our hankering for “home” will usually be escapist. Regressive. We won’t grow up.
So we build a highway for God to reach us, by clearing a path in our daily lives where we are free and alone and quiet before the Presence. Then, oddly, home finds us.
Prayer: Let us find, say, five quiet minutes this day, Lord, so that we can find our home in you. Amen.
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Home in a strange land, and finding it by building a road in rather than out – marvelous.
Thanks, Johnna–building that road IN turns out to be the main task of the spiritual life, don’t you think?
Reminds me of being 10 years old on our family trip out West and driving for hundreds of miles without seeing another car (just signs for Wall Drug).
Meditation so hard for me, why I need it.
Amazing how prolific and insightful you are David during the Advent Season, thank you.
As a South Dakota native that Wall Drug story made me laugh! I agree about meditation–doesn’t come easy for me either. But I know it’s soul medicine (and body too, for that matter).
We needed to hear this! Thank you!
Glad it found a home in your hear today, Lee.
“I want to go home.”
“Oh how I wanna go home. I wanna go home. Oh how I wanna go home.” – song by Bobby Bare 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4GHY-fpOc
If I am saying that I want to go home, I am also saying that I recognize where I seem to be is not home. To say that I want to go home immediately implies that I have been home and where I am now is not home and I want to return home.
Luke 17:20-21
King James Version
20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
“The kingdom of God is within you.” What ‘within’ are we talking about here? It’s certainty not within the body. Where is ‘within?”
I am reminded of a quote for Osho…
“If you think that you are rooted and you are at home in this world, you must be
living below humanity, because anyone who is ‘really’ human immediately becomes
aware that this cannot be the life.
“It may be a passage, a journey, but this cannot be the goal. And once you feel
homeless in this world, then the search starts.
“That certain man had said, “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.”
He may be thinking that Jesus is going to the east, or the west or the south or
the north. “I will follow him”, but he does not know the direction where Jesus
is going.
“Jesus is going god-ward, and that is not north, that is not east, that is not
west, that is not south; that is neither up or down – it is none of these. To go
god-ward is to go within. In fact, that is not a direction at all. It is to lose
all directions: north, east, south, west, up, down – to lose all directions. To
go within-ward means to move in the dimensionless, directionless. To go within
is to go beyond space, that is where Jesus is moving.
“You can’t understand what the invisible is, because at the most you can think
about it negatively – you can think it is that which is not visible.
No, the invisible is also visible, but you need different eyes to see it “