Make Way…

I was on a phone call the other day with a wise new friend.  Somehow in the conversation, my friend brought up the words from Psalm 77 about how the Lord makes a way where there was none.

I’ve been thinking about those words quite a bit since.  That day even, I knew I had more to chew on with those words…the reminder that God doesn’t need a way that makes sense or is obvious to get us where he wants us to go.

For some reason I ended up reading through some old devotions and came across this one, written just a few days after we lost our baby, Fisher, in March of this year.

Then, there it was…Psalm 77, staring back at me…not fully copied and pasted within the margins of that post.  Verses 1-15 shared.  A lament to the Lord.  Words like “weary, rejected, disturbed, faint, and forgotten” speckled throughout the psalm that spoke to my soul in such relatability.  I got it.  I felt that way.  And I found comfort too in remembering that Jesus had felt that way on the cross as well.

As I read back through though, I realized that the part I’d shared, through verse 15, was so applicable to me at that time, I managed to overlook the rest of the psalm somehow in my grief.  I saw the promise of the Lord in verses 11-15, the reminder that God is a redeemer, that he works wonders and is good, but I missed part….until just the other day.

I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
and meditate on your mighty deeds.
Your way, O God, is holy.
What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders;
you have made known your might among the peoples.
You with your arm redeemed your people,
the children of Jacob and Joseph.

Psalm 77:11-15

It wasn’t until my friend mentioned it, that I went back and spent some time with the rest of that psalm…

“Your way was through the sea,
your path through the great waters;
yet your footprints were unseen.
You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.”
Psalm 77:19-20

Here I am now, 8 months later, realizing that God parted waters and made a way where it seemed that there wasn’t one.  I came to the edge of a vast ocean, hemmed in by the life chasing hard behind me…my own version of a vengeful Egypt hot on my trail…threatening to overtake me if I didn’t keep moving.  So I did….I kept moving….towards an ocean of impossibility.  Putting one foot in front of the other, worrying about just the next step I had to make…I crossed over.

Here’s what I wrote to my friend after the Lord revealed this all to me last week:

“I’m on the other side of that ocean now…and He’s closing those parted waters back over.  I see how I got here, but I can’t go back there to the other side again.  I see how his promises have made a way where there shouldn’t have logically been one, and now when I look back, I see that other side, but in between it’s filled in with his goodness.”

And I want to remind you my friends….that He makes a way.  He makes new ways.  He creates dry paths across vast oceans and rivers, walkways through deserts, and He forms rivers through droughtlands.

Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
-Isaiah 43:19

And those ways that he makes….they are better.  Because if I’d been Moses, I’d have hit the edge of that water and panicked.  I’d have looked around the dry desert and wondered how I’d fashion enough rafts for tens of thousands of people to cross an entire sea.  And I would have thought to myself that by all reason, sometimes there just isn’t a way.

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”
– Matt 10:27

“You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
Psalm 16:11

But, there is friends….with God, there is always a way.  Sometimes, we just have to take the steps forward into the “impossible” to walk on dry land.  Then, at some point in our journey, we’ll look back and realized that we crossed over a place where there wasn’t a way that we could see, and God has covered that place back over with his goodness and mercy.

Photo Credit: A Lonely Walk to the Ocean