Have You Not Heard?
(NRSV) Is 40:28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
I have been reading the Bible for most of my 74 years, and I have noticed certain phrases stand out to me. “Come and see,” the wonderful invitation from Jesus to His disciples; “Watch and Pray,” the cautionary phrase Jesus spoke in the Garden the night He gave Himself up for us; and, of course, “Have You Not Heard,” the question Isaiah posed to those under captivity to the Assyrians. In other words, “Have you forgotten Who God is and all that He has done.”
The Hebrews had been in captivity to the Assyrians for more than forty years, and their perspective was one of a perpetual captive. The hope we have in God is not transitory, nor is it conditional. Our hope in God is a confident expectation that God will accomplish all He has set out to do.
When I was suffering from my first heart attack at age 50, a strange phenomenon occurred; my eyesight was impacted and I was unable to read anything. But I could still write. It was then that I began to write my devotionals as well as resuming poetry, a lifelong pursuit that began when I was six years old.
I am closing today with one of my poems from that time more than twenty-four years ago.
Hope
Hope drifts in on angel’s wings, barely
disturbing the air, the room, we
hardly know it’s there.
Yet, it arrives, unhurried, but
not unwanted.
We see it in the
face of a friend, the
trace of a smile, or simply
a kind word. It is the promise
of good things to come, the
assurance that we are not alone. It is
what gets us through another day
when we think we cannot go on.
May we know, understand and believe that we can place our hope in the Lord, and that He will sustain us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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