Venturing Out

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD . . . "  (Isaiah 6:1)

A blog?  Me?  Why?  There are millions of blogs out there, and I can count on two fingers the number of them that I actually bother to read.  Besides that, it strikes me as a somewhat narcissistic endeavour -- to put my random thoughts "out there" as if they are worth the time it would take for someone else to read them; trust me, they're not.  

And then there's the whole privacy thing.  How comfortable am I, really, with the thought that the whole wide world can become privy to my thoughts and musings and mental ramblings?  Oh, I write.  I write and I lock my words up behind passwords and encryption codes which my brother assures me can be bypassed by the average 4-year-old, but which allow me to rest in my illusion of privacy.  But a blog?  Written for the whole world to see?  That's another story entirely.

But here I am.    First it was Facebook.  Now this.  A digital immigrant struggling to learn the language of this new country.

It's been a long time coming.  People have told me for years, "You should write."  I've laughed them off.  I've changed the topic.  I don't "write".  I write for myself, not for others.  But life is a funny thing.  Things change.  And if everything else is changing, maybe this needs to change, too.

What would I "write"?  My life is actually pretty ordinary -- far too tedious to bore the world with its details. No one wants to know what I ate for breakfast or supper; we get plenty of that on Facebook.  But maybe, if I could show people glimpses of the King, maybe that would be something worth writing about.

Isaiah caught a glimpse of him, and it changed his life.  It was a time when things were going from bad to worse.  Uzziah, king of Judah, had just died.  He'd been an ok king.  He made a few mistakes, but the Bible tells us that he "did what was right in the eyes of the LORD."  Now he was gone, and the king coming behind him was a different story.  Judah was facing religious apathy, political unrest, and war.  Not a great time to be a prophet of God.  But Isaiah caught a glimpse of the King, the LORD, seated on his throne, and it changed him.  It broke him and brought him to his knees, and then it gave him the courage to respond.

That text has always steadied me when I am facing my own changes.  It reminds me that the God I serve is high and exalted, that he is holy, holy, holy, and that before him, I am one of unclean lips desperately in need of his redemption -- and miracle of miracles, he provides it!  It drives me forward into things that make me horribly uncomfortable; when he asks, "Who shall I send, and who will go for us," I find myself answering, "Here am I; send me."  Not because I am brave or worthy or capable of completing the task, but only because he is high and exalted and the train of his robe fills the temple, and he is surrounded by seraphs crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD Almighty!  The whole earth is filled with his glory!"  Isaiah 6 reminds me that the veil between daily living and eternal reality is thin.  If only I have eyes to look, I will catch glimpses of the King as I go about the business of living my life as a follower of Jesus Christ.

So these will be glimpses of the King.  Thoughts and ideas about how earthly living and heavenly glory intersect.  I hope it will change me.  At best, maybe it will help you think about things differently, too.  At worst, it is just one more blog you can ignore.