Is 40:1-11 & Mk 1:1-8
A sportscaster was interviewing a college basketball coach about his newest star player. “I know he’s great on the court,” said the newscaster, “but how’s his academic work?”
“He makes straight A’s,” replied the coach.
“No kidding,” said the newsman.
“It’s true,” said the coach. “Of course, his B’s are a little crooked!”
+ + +
That fellow needed help! So do we all, and our need only gets clearer as life rolls along: We make wrong turns, we get stuck, we do foolish things and hurtful things, we run out of gas, we run out of answers. We’re hungry, and we long to be full.
Ever more insistently, life tells us we need Someone bigger than ourselves to anchor our lives. We need God, to walk with us, to light our path and lighten our burdens. We were not made to walk alone.
We know all that. Yet too much of the time we DO walk alone, in the dark, oppressed by many burdens, not because God has turned his back on us, but because we’ve just not let him in — at least not all the way.
Through his prophet Isaiah — “Prepare the way of the Lord” — God is inviting us to think more deeply about this, and to search for what may be keeping God from being our center, our anchor, our North Star, from being our comfort and our strength. What are we clinging to that leaves so little room for the One who loves us most in all the world? What angers, what fears, what ways of thinking, what ways of being are holding us hostage and keeping us so far from the One who alone can give us life?
We have to find those angers and fears, those narrow ways of thinking and being. We have to name them and give them all to God. Then there will be room for him at our very center, and he will come in — all the way into our lives — and stay there always.
That is what our hearts long for. And that is what we can have this very day, if we let go of whatever is standing in God’s way.
So let go of it all, and give it to God. He will fill you full!
