ann kiemel

it's been a busy day.
full of unexpected complications.
but i know i am to praise God for His
sovereignty.

sunday night, i was drawn to isaiah 53.
find a Bible. dig for one. go to any church
close by and ASK if they will give you one.
call a friend. you HAVE to have a Bible to
capture, for me, the most moving, beautiful,
unveiling of Jesus and His life BEFORE He
was even born of mary.

look in the index of the Bible.
take your finger and rub it along the list of
books until you find isaiah. turn to the page
listed. please. you have to. you cannot miss this.
my favorite book in the entire Bible.

it haunts me. moves me to tears. the
superficiality is torn from the walls of my sometimes
wayward heart. oh, the world has it all wrong. the
Christian arena is, itself, falling prey to the luscious lies
of secularism, and we don't even seem to notice. so subtle
are the ways we are pulled in.

i'm just going to quote a piece of it today. more later.
Isaiah 53:2-3:

"He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like the root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him.
nothing in His appearance that we
should desire Him.
He was despised and rejected by men.
a man of sorrow and familiar with suffering.
like one from whom men hide their faces.
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not."

everything the world celebrates ... and most Christians, too,
is for us to look as beautiful as we can. do what it means,
by all costs, to be accepted and loved. the very thought
of being despised horrifies us.

but Jesus accepted a rejection that none of us
can imagine. lived with suffering and sorrow.
we RUN...no, we race from such things befalling
us. we protect ourselves and our children at all
costs.

"a tender shoot...
and a root out of dry ground...."

glory! glory!
hallelujah for the Lamb.

thank you for all the touching comments.
for standing with me. travelling this road.
running next to the THE Runner. flow, grace, flow.
purge us of worldly views. cover world, cover.
that our hearts will not be diverted from the scrubbed-
clean beauty of the Savior of the world.