A level playing field

Every valley shall be lifted up,

every mountain and hill made low;

The rugged land shall be a plain,

the rough country, a broad valley. (Isaiah 40:4)

We go through life seeing the hardships before us, the rockiness of our path, its instability. Life presents to us what seems like an abyss out of which we cannot climb or a mountain we cannot traverse. But God will make a level ‘playing field’ for us if we permit Him. He carries us over the rocks, lifts us out of the abyss, and flies us over the mountains carried in the breath of His Spirit, as on the wings of eagles (Isaiah 40:31). In this way, the dangerous paths, the parts we cannot traverse on our own, are leveled; He who made and sustains them sustains us as well.  

Because of our broken human nature, we will oft see our path as ‘worse’ than someone else’s, even (and perhaps especially) in families. Our heart shouts “unfair!”. Our ‘wants’ are greater than can be met by family members who themselves are equally as broken as us. For example, the prodigal son parable (Luke 15:11-32) portrays God’s unceasing love and mercy for us. But hovering in the background is a story of a sibling rivalry. This rivalry, this bad spirit, between the older and younger brother did not just occur at the moment of the younger brother’s demand for his inheritance. A weakness of charity in the older brother would have already been present, disposing him to be consumed by bitterness even after the younger brother’s return. It would have been pre-existing and building up to that moment.  

Our God, the prodigal’s Father, made the paths level by a total restoration of the son to the family. A cleansing of his sins, a restoration of the son’s soul to a state of perfection. We receive this in the Sacraments. If we were to die the moment after receiving the Eucharist, we’d go straight to Heaven! But if our heart is like that of the older son, absorbed in what we believe to be ‘right’ and thus due to us, that sacramental grace is ineffective. Jesus says few will make it into His Kingdom. We cannot just appear righteous (Luke 18:9-14). We must allow ourselves to be made righteous by receiving the Sacraments and then living in it thereafter. 

With eyes of faith opened by grace, we also can see our own role in having positioned ourselves to fall into the abyss. Illuminated are the rocks which we placed on our own path, and the look-alike paths we have chosen to follow that dead-end at the base of an impassable mountain. 

I will lead the blind on a way they do not know;

by paths they do not know I will guide them.

I will turn darkness into light before them,

and make crooked ways straight.

These are my promises:

I made them, I will not forsake them. (Isaiah 42:16)

We stumble and God picks us up. His will is itself a mystery so we cannot expect to know it fully nor follow it perfectly. But what we can control is our willingness to accept and embrace Providence. Acceptance of this mystery releases the self-imposed tension of not understanding His will. God, whose power is in us, can do immeasurably more than we can imagine or ask from Him. 

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam 😊

(Image by Tobias Bjørkli from Pexels)