God Does Not Grow Weary in Responding to Our Needs

In today’s first reading, Isaiah 40: 25-31, Isaiah reminds us that God “does not faint nor grow weary, and his knowledge is beyond scrutiny.”  How often, I wonder, do I not reduce God to my level of weariness and my limited knowledge? If I did not, consciously or unconsciously, do this, then why am I hesitant to follow God’s lead, to rest, to take my burdens to Him, or to realize that God knows me through and through, that God knows the heart and the mind of every human being?  Every detail of a human endeavor is known to God before anyone initiates or implements that plan. Why, Isaiah asks, do we say “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?  If I took the time to disclose my plans to the Lord, He would give me the enlightenment that I need to move forward with the plan or to discard it because it is against God’s will and violates the rights of others.

Jesus says in today’s Gospel, Matthew 11: 28-30: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” But, no, I keep on frantically being involved. I do not give myself the gift of letting go and sitting with the Lord in total stillness, letting the Lord give me the peace which the world cannot give. Only then will I do what is right and experience God’s abundant blessings.

 Often during His lifetime, burdened by the demands of His life, Jesus stopped and withdrew into the mountains to be with His Father in prayer. We, too, need to do that. Our desire for peace, our hope in the Lord, needs to be expressed by stopping from time to time to visit the Lord in quiet. We will then know the truth of Isaiah’s teaching: “They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength, they will soar as with eagles’ wings; they will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint.”