Isaiah 35-38
I wonder if you ever stuffed your pockets with acorns as a child. My guess is, you did.
I have fond memories of scrambling around under the old oak trees in the park, searching and hoarding the biggest and best ones until my pockets bulged… Or more recently, sitting serenely under a grove of
oaks one stunning Sabbath afternoon in Germany while a half dozen young German and Austrian friends did the scrambling for me, enthusiastically delivering a pile of acorns to my lap…
I don’t know, there’s just something about it.
And maybe when you too had your pockets full of perfect ones, your mother saw you hobbling towards the car and asked “What are you going to do with those?”
“Oh, I don’t know… something special. I’m– I’m going to make something…”
If you were anything like me, you had no idea what you were going to make. It probably ended up being an absurd construction paper/acorn collage that rivaled modern art for abstraction, but which your mother still treasures to this day.
Whatever the case, you had dreams for those acorns…
Hezekiah had dreams too… Dreams for his life, and for his reign that sickness suddenly threatened. All at once we find the king weeping pitifully, longing for a little more time… And who wouldn’t?
And then we hear God in His eternal pity give him a promise, fully knowing what it would cost future generations…
God will lay aside His dreams, if we insist on ours.
His dream for every acorn is much bigger than an absurd collage. And don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty in that childish art. It just doesn’t remotely approximate to the glory of the oak tree…
Our problem is that instead of letting our own dreams go in favor of His, we pursue His glory the best way we know how– stuffing our pockets with the best in the hopes that we can make something worthy of them.
But dreams must die, before they can grow.
The acorn must die… First, it must be deemed unfit by even the hungriest of squirrels, then it must be forgotten… Often it gets buried deep beneath layers of rubbish, seemingly lost in a tangle of old leaves and dirt, much like our tangled and mangled hopes and dreams. It must give itself up. Totally. Permanently.
Then it grows.
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God has a thousand other dreams too… Like turning enemies into dead men (Isa. 37:36) and and turning deserts into rose gardens. (Isa. 35:1)
What He needs is children that will cling more tenaciously to their Father’s dreams than to their own. Children that are willing to surrender to Him not just that in them which is evil, but more painfully that which is rightfully theirs, and perfectly good, if He asks for it.
Anything less will be less than His best…
July 14, 2010 at 12:20 am
Hey Sean,
Thank you for taking the time to write these posts out. They are very inspirational! 🙂
July 14, 2010 at 11:26 am
I was right there with you Sean- gathering all those acorns. Except I was planning on making a darling little picture frame outlined with acorns and pine cones, and whatever other woodsy item I could find. It was going to be shellacked beautifully and I'd give it to Mother. The picture frame never happened. I threw away the last of the acorns just a few years ago.
I'm powerfully moved by the thought of the bigger dream He has for the "acorn" of my life. All the hopes and desires and longings will be fulfilled perfectly- when they die and spring forth at His command, in His timing, in His way. Thanks for the reminder, and for a post that will always make me think of discussions in a little Toyota Corrola. God is good to us.
July 19, 2010 at 12:22 am
Oh, thank you for that post. It struck a deep note in my heart.
Oh how beautiful, yet how painful, that some dreams must die before they can live. I have experienced that very thing in my life. I must ask myself far too many times the question, "Do I want my will, or His?". I can't see beyond today but He can see into eternity… why do I not trust…? He loves me more than I can comprehend, but my feeble understanding longs for a 'sign'.
God is faithful yet. If I will just cling, trembling though I be, to His promises in faith believing His word not because I can see, but because He has said, then His perfect will for my life will be worked according to His good pleasure, and when it is all said and done I will not have wanted it to be any other way.