February 24

Songs From A Dust-heap!

Your dead will live; their bodies will rise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust! For your dew is like the dew of the morning, and the earth will bring forth her dead. — Isa 26:19 BSB

This joyful call to “awake and sing” is addressed to those who dwell in the dust. The world is filled with them—those crushed by disappointed love or failed dreams, those who, like Bartimaeus, are blind and reduced to beggary. Hope is often depicted as blindfolded, with her head downcast and her lyre broken in her hand. She sits on the axis of the earth, pressing the one remaining unbroken string to her ear, listening for the music of a better time. So it is with many lives, where one by one, the strings have snapped, and they have been left sitting in the dust of despair.

It may be that you feel far from God—not because of any sin, but due to physical weakness, mental exhaustion, or the loneliness of sorrow. Perhaps you have been seeking an experience of God, rather than God Himself. You have been searching for Him outwardly, while He waits within.

Perhaps you are frustrated by unanswered prayer. "O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; and by night, but I find no rest." Yet no answer seems to come, and your prayers feel like ships lost at sea.

Maybe your life has not met the ideals you once held. As the years go by, disillusionment and heartache grow. Life may offer its rewards, but they do not seem to come to you.

To all such, hear Isaiah’s words: "Awake and sing, for your dew is as the dew of light." Here, dew represents God’s grace and love. Where there once was dust, now there will be dew. The driest, most barren places are the most tenderly touched by the dew. Even graveyards receive this grace, calling them to awake and sing with the promise of resurrection.

Sing, because your emotional “down-sittings” do not affect your standing in Christ. We all face moments of despondency, but “the Lord has chastened me severely, yet He has not given me over to death. Open for me the gates of joy, that I may enter and praise the Lord!”

Prayer

We thank You, Lord, that many of the evils we feared never reached us. The storms have passed outside the circle of our lives. Your mercy is greater than our sin, Your provision is bigger than our need, and Your grace is more abundant than the weight of temptation. Amen.