Most Ravaged

Hannah has always been my favorite. The woman who prayed so fervently she appeared drunk. The one who was willing to give up all that she’d asked for – to be met by the God who always gives more than we petition (see 1 Samuel 2:1-10; 21).

Yet perhaps what I love most about her is that she typifies how God desires to bring us the greatest level of honor and comfort where there had once been the most profound level of shame and distress; how He longs to bless us with the pronouncement: “Instead of your shame you will have a double portion, and instead of humiliation they will shout for joy over their portion” (Isaiah 61:7).

Haggai brought her story to mind the other day with the verses of strife and instability, and then the concluding promise, ‘and in this place I will give peace’ (2:9). Why is God always so emphatic that healing and rest come precisely where the heartache has been greatest? Why is it so crucial to Him for us to understand that - like with that yearning, barren woman, like with His people Israel - He’s specifically ordained the height of restoration and joy to come on that plane which was most ravaged and hopeless?

It intrigues me that He doesn’t simply “start over;” that He refuses to abandon an area of our lives to the despair which seeks to infuse it, but would instead undertake, with great effort, to renew the ‘old’ with an unexpected ‘new.’ This God - who was so intentional about marking the valley of Achor, once a place of judgment and death (Joshua 7:24-26), as a ‘door of hope’ (Hosea 2:15) and a ‘resting place’ (Isaiah 65:10) - is the same who desires to reconcile in our lives those lifeless and decimated realms with His original purpose of health and wholeness.

And so He zeroes in on the exact location where the sorrow is rooted, then works healing out to the periphery. It's as though He most delights to spend the time meticulously working on that which all others have discounted and deemed “lost,” then quietly present us with the reality that He is the only One who has tenderly devoted Himself to mend what was completely shattered.

Perhaps His favorite areas of operation are those most devastated, not because of how their hopelessness directs our cries to Him, nor even because of the way He can exhibit His power before others, but because He cares too passionately about us to ignore the core of our grief. Instead, He re-works life within that same paradigm, that we would know Him, not as the God who lamely removes us from a path which couldn’t be redeemed, but as the One who personally meets us in that very location where He can prove Himself to be the God who ‘makes all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).