TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
After reading today’s first reading (Isaiah), I considered what it’d be like if I opened the news and read, “But a very little while and...the trees will stop dying and war will end. In a little while, incurable diseases will be curable, and there will be food on every table. If you just hang on a little longer, the misery hanging over your head, the helplessness, the agony that cries from deep inside of you will be no more.”
I considered how I might live differently with these kinds of headlines. How much heaviness would be lifted if even one of those things were true. How I might feel like I have more space, more joy, more capacity to truly live!
Even though I (unsurprisingly) didn’t read those headlines in the news, I did return to Isaiah and found him promising some really wildly hopeful stuff that, in light of reality, felt ridiculous to read. Like, are you kidding?! Have you lived on this planet for even a minute?!
But the thing is, the entirety of Christian life is built on an outlandish promise. On headlines that boast words like “eternity” and “meaning” and “the end of suffering”. It feels ridiculous in the midst of the very real and awful headlines of today to consider what God offers us. But even within the ridiculous, God speaks. That the men in the Gospel are healed from a lifetime of blindness. Isaiah promises peace. My life can change. A baby is born whose death will alter the course of every life. God presents hope to us in a wild package of mystery – in headlines that seem too good to be true.
Maybe it’s worth clicking on a couple. Maybe it’s worth reading the story. Maybe it’s not too good to be true. Maybe it is, well, true.
Let yourself play outside of the limits you may place on your life or God’s acting in it and ask: how different would my life be if I lived as though God’s mysterious promise of hope was even just the smallest bit true? How can I discover hope in the mystery?
Teresa Nygard