Isaiah 15

Saturday, March 30, 2013
Holy Saturday

Isaiah 15

My first thought on reading how Moab will be reduced to a wasteland is, "Good gracious, what has Moab ever done to you?"  I suspect a cursory examination of Jewish history would inform me of this, of course.

But something about the way that the Bible kept saying that they would cry out made me wonder - to whom?  To the God of the Jews making them suffer?  To the God of the Jews in true belief that the Egyptians must have come away with?  To the God of the Jews for mercy and love?

I'm not sure I think that adversity breeds better people.  Good people can be refined and strengthened by it, that I believe.  I've seen people turn bitter, however, and go dark.  People who I hesitate to think that was their "nature" all the time.  So...I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here.

I want this entry to be excellent and insightful and somehow sum up the little journey of this Lent - but it hasn't entirely felt that way.  Perhaps because of all the different books of the Bible, perhaps because I changed my observance part way through, perhaps just because I haven't been as devout and thoughtful this Lent.

Perhaps...perhaps I'm writing in the morning because I am headed to a wedding in Houston tonight and not bringing my computer.  So I'm trying to force revelation early in the morning on my schedule.

Perhaps that's part of faith too, and it's a definition of hope a priest once told me in confession that made it feel like the most bold and wonderful and rare of the three cardinal virtues: "the faith that some day it will be made clear."  Or the faith that someday X will happen.  The faith that we are only waiting until the day when everything will be revealed and all suffering will be washed away and we will stand before the Face of God.

So I have hope that someday I will understand why Moab was leveled to the ground.