It's Not About Me - Max Lucado [10]
Isaiah could relate. When he sees the holiness of God, Isaiah does not boast or swagger. He takes no notes, plans no sermon series, launches no seminar tours. Instead, he falls on his face and begs for mercy. “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5).
The God-given vision was not about Isaiah but about God and his glory. Isaiah gets the point. “It’s not about me. It’s all about him.” He finds humility, not through seeking it, but through seeking him. One glimpse and the prophet claims citizenship among the infected and diseased—the “unclean,” a term used to describe those with leprosy. God’s holiness silences human boasting.
And God’s mercy makes us holy. Look what happens next.
GOD’S HOLINESS SILENCES
HUMAN BOASTING.
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.” (Isaiah 6:6-7)
Isaiah makes no request. He asks for no grace. Indeed, he likely assumed mercy was impossible. But God, who is quick to pardon and full of mercy, purges Isaiah of his sin and redirects his life.
God solicits a spokesman. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” (6:8).
Isaiah’s heart and hand shoot skyward. “Here am I. Send me!” (6:8). A glimpse of God’s holiness and Isaiah had to speak. As if he’d found the source of the river, ridden the rage of the canyon. As if he’d seen what Moses had seen—God himself.
Albeit a glimpse, but a God-glimpse nonetheless.
And he was different as a result.
Holy different.
CHAPTER FIVE
JUST A MOMENT
5
Young parents typically rejoice when their children learn new phrases.
“Honey, little Bobby just said bye-bye!”
“Mom, you’ll never believe what your granddaughter just did. She counted to five.”
Or,“Ernie, tell your uncle what the bird says.”
We applaud such moments. I did too.
With one exception.
One phrase my daughter learned gave me pause. Jenna was nearly or barely two years of age, just learning to speak well. With her little hand lost in my big one, we walked through the lobby of our apartment building. Suddenly she stopped. Spotting a ball, she looked up at me and requested,“Just a moment.” Sliding her hand from mine, she walked away.
A moment? Who had told her about moments? To date, her existence had been time-free.Toddlers know no beginning or end or hurry or slow or late or soon.The small world of a child amplifies present tense and diminishes future and past. But Jenna’s phrase,“Just a moment,” announced that time had entered her world.
In his autobiography, The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner divides his life into three parts: “once below a time,” “once above a time,” and “beyond time.” The childhood years, he says, are lived “once below a time. . . .What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless?”1
Is childhood for us what life in the Garden was like for Adam and Eve? Before the couple swallowed the line of Satan and the fruit of the tree, no one printed calendars or wore watches or needed cemeteries. They indwelt a time-free world. Minutes passed equally unmeasured in Jenna’s two-year-old world. No thought of life being anything different than daily walks and naps and music and Mom and Dad. But “just a moment” belied the intrusion of pirates on her innocent island. Time had invaded her world.
Life, she was discovering, is a cache of moments: measurable and countable