Here I Am

Maybe you have prayed about the same thing for months and heard nothing. When someone suggests there is a reason for the silence, that can feel like being blamed for it, and the objection is honest.

Isaiah 58 also asks for an honest confession, and it belongs to all of us. We are very good at the religious half of life. We fast, or keep our own version of it, and we keep our habits. Yet we can also be short with the people who work for us, repeat a rumour, or arrange our money so that somebody else takes the loss. In this chapter God explains to people just like us why heaven seems quiet. They ask Him plainly: "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?" And He answers just as plainly: "Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours." In other words, they drove their workers hard on the very day they fasted. "Behold, ye fast for strife and debate."

The instructions that follow are all things you do with your hands: "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free," and "to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house." Then comes the word the promise hangs on, which is "then": "Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am."

Keep reading past the promise, because the same verse goes on. It names "the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity," which means pointing the finger at other people and empty, harmful talk. So the promise has a condition on both sides of it.

This truth flatters none of us, including me. God's silence is not always His absence. Sometimes He is still speaking about the very subject we changed. And when we turn back to it, His promise is plain: we will call, and He will say, "Here I am."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 214 is Singers Before the Army (2 Chronicles 20:21).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna