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\u201cForget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.\u201d (Isaiah 43:19-21)

It\u2019s hot and dry.

And I\u2019m not talking about the heat warning and lack of rain we currently face.

In our wilderness wanderings outside the shelter of the church building, we are starting to feel parched. It truly is a wilderness out there. We\u2019re lonely for want of community as we roam isolated haunts like the jackals. We\u2019re dried up for want of the refreshment of the water and juice of the sacraments administered and shared in person. We\u2019re heat-exhausted from long exposure in the elements without the cooling wind of the Word preached and lived through the Spirit in the place of communal Christian worship. How we long for an oasis!

It\u2019s hard for things, including Christians, to grow in lonely soil that\u2019s dry and scorched. Yet God\u2019s people lived in the wilderness for forty years. Not only lived: but thrived, flourished, and multiplied\u2014because God was with them in the wilderness.

But here in Isaiah, where the message is coming to exiles after the fall of Jerusalem, that\u2019s not what God is talking about. God, through Isaiah, begins to mention how He saved Israel from Egypt only in the very next breath to tell them to \u201cforget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!\u201d He says.

The exiles were not to look back to what they had, or even to the ways that God had saved before, because the God they served was a Sovereign God, who continued to do \u201cnew things.\u201d

So, can the God who does \u201cnew things\u201d do a new thing even here in this COVID wilderness today? Can the God who makes a way through Jesus and provides water through the Spirit in the wilderness still refresh and sustain us as His people to praise and proclaim His name?

I think He can. And I think He does. Sometimes, in surprising new ways that look very little like the former ways we know.

It can be scary, but remember, we never journey alone.

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