God Is Always Making a Way
Dear Friends,
Today brings us closer to Holy Week, and the lectionary returns us—once again—to the wilderness. It’s been a recurring theme throughout Lent: that dry, disorienting space where clarity fades and the familiar is left behind.
In today’s reading from Isaiah 43, God speaks to a people still reeling from exile. They’ve lost their temple, their homeland, and perhaps their sense of who God is. And to them, the prophet declares: “Do not remember the former things…I am about to do a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” A new thing—emerging not after the wilderness, but in the midst of it. Right there in the desert, God promises rivers.
In a commentary I read this week, writer and pastor Craig Barners described how disruptions—whether joyful or painful—can open us to the surprising grace of God. Sometimes the disruption is dramatic: a diagnosis, a loss, a love that arrives unannounced. Other times, it’s subtle: the sight of a child playing alone in the yard, or an old woman pushing a cart of cans that you can’t stop thinking about. These interruptions, he writes, propel us into a strange new future. And they call us to deeper trust—not in the promise of certainty, but in the presence of God along the way.
The wilderness, after all, has never only been a place of judgment. In scripture, it is also the place where people are reshaped—where the covenant is renewed, where water flows from rocks, where God’s people learn to live by daily manna. The desert doesn’t offer abundance in the usual sense, but it does offer something better: presence, clarity, and just enough grace to keep going.
Lent can feel like a fallow time, a season when we’re waiting for something to change, or for clarity to return. But maybe it’s not just waiting. Maybe it’s cultivating—tending the soil, as I shared in my sermon on the fig tree a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s in the middle of the wilderness that God is doing something new in us. Something small but real, like a stream threading its way through the dust.
We’re reminded of that promise in this week’s Gospel, too. In the middle of a dinner party, Mary interrupts everything with her extravagant act of love: a pound of costly perfume, pure nard, poured out on Jesus’ feet. In a world of scarcity, her gift is a stream of abundance. It fills the house with fragrance. It breaks the rules of decorum. And Jesus receives it as a sign of what’s to come—holy disruption that redefines what it means to be faithful.
Wherever you find yourself this week–clear or uncertain, steady or stumbling—may you trust that God is still making a way. Even in dry places, there is water. Even in exile, there is hope. And even in disruption, there may be the beginning of something new.
In Christ,
Amelie+
