Rivers in the Desert

This week, five days out from a work trip I’m ambivalent about, which requires me to get on a plane (which I fear and loathe), I stumbled across the following verse on my Bible app:

Do not remember the former things or ponder the things of the past.  “Listen carefully, I am about to do a new thing, now it will spring forth; will you not be aware of it? I will even put a road in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.”

The cherry on top was the image on which the verse was superimposed: a blue sky, with a moving plane coasting over it.  It’s been a while since I had this sort of moment, a Scripture that seemed meant and molded for this precise moment in my experience—and I could not help but laugh that God stamped a plane on it, as though to doubly ensure it got my attention. This is for you! Yes, you, plane-fearer.

The verse emerges from the context of God’s intended and promised deliverance of His people.  In an exultant chapter, God sketches out the victorious promise of Israel’s redemption from exile, of calling His beloved people back to Himself.  “Who among [the idolaters] can predict this [that Judah would return from captivity] and proclaim to us the former events?” God asks (v. 9, AMP).

A delight hides in this chapter, as though God Himself is anticipating—and perhaps reveling in—the surprise of the nations and the world and even His own people when He fulfills the wholeness of His plan.  This plays into the verse I wrote out in full above.  After invoking memories of past redemption—God’s path through the sea, the downing of the chariot and horse (v. 16), God extols the people not to ponder the past but to anticipate something wholly new and unexpected.

All this to say: God may not save us the same way twice, but He will save us.  Are we open to what that might mean?

I’m a scholar.  Pondering the past is, quite literally, a large part of what I do.  My fellow academics sit down and look over books and analyze and draw conclusions based on research.  I live for patterns.  And, if I’m quite honest, I’ve developed a certain set of expectations of God in a similar way.  I believe He is just and good and wise and merciful; I also anticipate that His justice and goodness and wisdom and mercy will manifest in particular expected ways.

And that, perhaps, is where I falter—where we all falter.

We forget, often, how unanticipated God was to all who followed Him.  How very unlike He was, and is, to meet all of our expectations of how God—how any God!—ought to be or behave.  Israel anticipated a Messiah, surely.  They did not anticipate this Messiah: a Messiah who challenged and provoked them, who upended their theological expectations and carefully-crafted spiritual approaches, who went around healing and forgiving people, and claiming to be God but refusing to subvert the colonizing empire in a way that anyone would recognize immediately.  A God who came not to conquer, but to die and rise again.

Many of them missed it, then. So I wonder what we are missing now in our expectations of past and patterns, of what has come before.

Am I leaving room for God to surprise me?  Am I assuming that God can or does want to surprise me?  Are my eyes open to all the possibilities, all the places he could be or reveal Himself?  Do I believe—really believe—that even now He waits with that same delighted joy to show me what is possible that I didn’t imagine?

Over a decade ago now, I spent much time in grief over what seemed to be a lost calling.

My whole life I was told that my gift was to write and to teach.  Church leaders and congregants who knew me insisted this was what God had for me.  Family and friends affirmed it.  God’s blessings, too, fell into this line: scholarships, funding, opportunities.  Doors and windows blew open with no provocation.

And then, after my Ph.D., everything stopped.

I struggled to find the job I anticipated.  The job I did find was uncertain year to year, allowing few of the meaningful opportunities I’d grown accustomed to experiencing.   I begged God to open doors, carve a path.  I fired off writing submissions hither and yon.  I applied for boatloads of teaching and writing opportunities.  Everything petered out. 

Weary, resigned, I wondered if it was possible for God to pull a bait-and-switch.  I couldn’t imagine possibilities outside of those I had constructed for myself, building on a pattern of the past.  I canceled my membership to the professional organization to which I belonged.  I wrote cheap pieces for meaningless pay and then gave up on that too.  I lost the job I did have.

And then: a job I didn’t want came along.

And this is what I mean, about being open to God.  Because I was so mad about this job.  It wasn’t a teaching job.  It wasn’t a writing job.  It was literally, on paper, the opposite of everything I could have ever wanted.  I wept taking it.  I mourned like a dream had died.  I cried in the bathroom every day for a whole month after I started. I viewed that job as the beginning of a life of settling for broken dreams.

Six years later, I look back in astonishment to find that God used that job to change my life.

And I couldn’t have known, back then, that my mother would die of cancer and that I’d need the sense of independence and the network of friendships from that job to find my way through.  I couldn’t have known that the “non-writing” job would become one, would turn writing and teaching into a career again.  I couldn’t have known that I’d not only rejoin that old professional organization I abandoned, but play a bigger role in it when I returned.  I couldn’t have imagined the me I would become through this.  I couldn’t have anticipated where I’d be, now—which is exactly, almost down to the letter, where I wanted to be then.

 I could never have thought of this for myself.  But God did.

Rivers in the desert.  Paths in the wilderness.  Nourishment and possibility springing up in hostile environments out of nowhere.  We so often look to fertile land for our hope; we never think to look to the valley of dry bones.  But, sons and daughters of men, God can make these bones live. 

And so when I think of possibility now, I ask myself: what looks dead and dying?  Where is the no-way?  What is dry?  Where is there barrenness?  Where is the wall and the closed door?  I must not dismiss it.  With God, I may never say, “There is no hope here,” or “There is nothing” or “Everything is lost.”

God so loves a surprise.

And God loves the surprise best that shows precisely who He is and reveals Him in His glory.

I want to stay forever open to surprises.