“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.... We all fade like a leaf..... ....You have hidden your face from us.”

Come, come, come!  How often do we identify with the cry of Isaiah?  In our personal lives when we are ravaged by illness, divorce, age, failure?  In our community lives where sometimes we feel we have no place? In our nation when we are plagued with a useless war? In our world in which the future so often looks bleak? Come, God! Come, come, come!

It is generally considered that this passage comes from a time when Israel was in exile. Accurate or not, it is clear the writer was experiencing an abandonment in which he was desperately calling for God’s presence, even intervention. Still, though he may have been hanging by quite a thin thread, he was hanging on.

In my prayers I generally try to avoid asking, at least keeping asking to a minimum. It seems somehow a perversion of prayer to be focusing on asking. Yet, when my wife, Marion, was hovering between life and death, I fervently prayed that she would live. She did not.  “O God, are you really there?  Come, come, into my life.”  Maybe I was hanging by quite a thin thread, but I was hanging on. And, ten plus years later, I am writing this meditation.

We approach Christmas. Bells are ringing. Carols endlessly fill the airwaves. Shops are laden with stuff trying to convince us that if we just buy enough of the right things, everything will be all right.  Christmas Eve and Christmas Day will come and go. And everything will not be all right. Just to remember that may be helpful.  Remembering that may even bring to us an awareness of what we are looking for and push us to do something.

Like Isaiah, we need to remember that God is still here. The writer may not have seen the end of the exile. But, for him, the reality of God’s presence and openness to God’s future prevailed. “Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are the work of your hand.”