Daily Word of Grace # 236 (May 7, 2021)

One of the most moving and vulnerable songs by the South Carolina based band Needtobreathe is “Wasteland” from their 2014 album Rivers in the Wasteland in which they sing: “There was a greatness I felt for a while but somehow it changed.  Some kind of blindness I used to protect me from all of my stains.  Yeah I wish this was vertigo.  It just feels like I’m falling slow.  Oh if God is on my side, then who can be against me?  Yeah in this wasteland where I’m living there is a crack in the door filled with light, and it’s all that I need to get by.  Yeah in this wasteland where I’m living there is a crack in the door filled with light, and it’s all that I need to shine.”  In the same way the Israelites wandered the wilderness for forty years, many of us have seasons in our lives when we feel like we are also wandering in the wilderness, or a wasteland.  And yet the psalmist assures us that God “turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water” (Psalm 107:35).  God is indeed on our side, just as the Apostle Paul wrote, “If God is for us, who is against us? (Romans 8:31)—so on our side in fact, that he died to save us and to cleanse us from all of our stains.  Moreover, no matter how dark it gets in the wasteland, Jesus remains the light of the world (John 8:12) so that there is indeed “a crack in the door filled with light”—now and always.

Love and Prayers,

Dave