July 14, 2022
The Almost Daily will be on Summer Vacation until August 8th. But fear not! You will receive a devotional each Monday through Friday from the excellent Mockingbird Devotional entitled Daily Grace. Enjoy! - Paul Walker
To you, O LORD, I cry. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flames have burned all the trees of the field. (Joel 1:19)
Reading the prophets is like watching a dystopian thriller: The land is desolate, food is scarce, people are dead or exiled, and hope is far away. On a movie screen, all those disasters are entertaining, sometimes. In scripture, on the other hand, they’re depressing and puzzling. Why all the locusts, invasions, sackcloth, and wailing?
I have never experienced grief like what Joel describes here, in large part because my life has been comparatively stable. But another factor also contributes, I think: Contemporary Americans don’t have any way to lament, not in the full-bodied way that we hear Joel’s audience did. What’s funny, though, is that while I envy their freedom of emotional expression, the LORD tells them it’s got to be more than that: “rend your hearts and not your clothing” (2:13). Don’t just show me you’re sorry; mean it!
I want to be that sincere, especially to God, but distractions and appetites, not my conscience, are what “rend” my heart, pulling me in different directions. Acknowledging this about myself shows how unstable my actual life is, at least on the inside. But long before I’ve glimpsed myself as I am, God sees me fully. Just as Jesus yelped, “they know not what they do,” and suffered under us still (Lk 23:34), so the Spirit sees that “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” and groans for us, more deeply than words (Rm 8:26).
And not only us, but the whole cosmos is in pain: In the next verse, Joel writes, “Even the wild animals cry to you because the watercourses are dried up.” Amid personal crises and climate crises, disasters that reek damage beyond what we can even know, none of the Bible’s most moving passages can fix it. But they do bring comfort.
The LORD will never ignore us, even our most half-hearted sighs.
[Kendall Gunter, Daily Grace - Mockingbird Devotional Vol. 2]
