Isaiah 46:3-4 “Listen to me… you whom I have upheld since your birth, and have carried since you were born. Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.”
When I was talking with my friend Jen the other day and she said, “I like to walk, just not uphill.” How I resonated with that! My guess—many of us prefer walking on level ground.
But I know a lot of people these days whose situations are forcing them to walk uphill. Circumstances they didn’t expect threaten to shove them right off the path. Health related issues, false accusations, divorce papers, betrayal and oppression burden them to exhaustion. They are tired and weary as they search for that elusive plateau.
Christian author Lysa Terkeurst writes in It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way how an avalanche of unexpected events flipped her world upside down. Try as she might, she couldn’t rally enough strength to cope with her circumstances. She finally realized God wasn’t asking her to. She says, “God doesn’t expect us to handle this. He wants us to hand this over to Him” (emphasis mine). When life overwhelms us, God doesn’t intend for us to keep walking up that hill on our own. He wants us to lean on him.
Even in our rebellion, God calls us to cry out to him. Israel’s years of idolatry threatened to destroy their identity as a nation. They were headed to exile in a foreign land with foreign gods, stripped of everything that distinguished them as God’s people. They would be “walking uphill” for 70 years.
Yet into this bleak future, Isaiah assures them of God’s promise to sustain them, to carry them as he had since their birth. In spite of their hard hearts, he planned to rescue them. And they would come out of this a stronger, more faithful people. Walking uphill tends to do that.
So how are you doing? Are you relying on God totally? Or do you find yourself striving to climb that hill on your own? Never forget God’s mercy. He promises to be your strength. Trust him no matter what the terrain.