I haven’t blogged for some time. The summary reason? Burnout.

I was reading the other day about resilience fatigue; the concept that there’s only so many times that you can keep getting back up before you just have to stop, because you can’t do it anymore.

It’s a pretty apt description of how many people are feeling post-pandemic. I put myself in that group.

Being a believer in an all-powerful God doesn’t make you immune from anything. This includes the natural fatigue and illness that goes hand-in-hand with experiences, such as what a pandemic inflicts on everyone that makes it through to the other side.

It seems that the minimal blogging I’m doing this year is reflecting on the theme of fatigue. In doing so, I’m reminded of this verse in Isaiah:

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice…

Hmm.

What about the times when the reed is broken? Is this verse saying that this will never happen? I don’t think so, but I think there’s a dialectical tension being created here that needs to be wrestled out with other verses.

Because there are verses that talk about brokenness and contrition. Their very existence means that God is aware that this happens to his followers:

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.

For this is what the high and exalted One says— he who lives forever, whose name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Has not my hand made all these things, and so they came into being?” declares the Lord. “These are the ones I look on with favour: those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word.

God doesn’t deny our brokenness. Neither does he despise it. If he did, he’d never be able to fix it. That would make him a pretty useless God; and the God of The Bible is anything but useless.

It actually appears that God completely acknowledges our brokenness and draws near to it.

Perhaps that is the very reason that the final sentence in the Isaiah verse indicates that despite the brokenness, the best is still yet to come:

In faithfulness he will bring forth justice…

Despite the rubble, there is still hope for a rebuild.

Yours still with hope, picking through the rubble,

Alison