On that day, a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.
(Isaiah 11: 1)
The heart is a bloom
Shoots up through the stony ground
(Beautiful Day, U2)
The wine goblet lifted in a toast on our springtime back porch must have been forged in a lehr-furnace at Hogwarts. I gazed down into that enchanted stemware, that had just moments earlier been raised in a benediction. Like a miniature television set, a scene emerged that had once transpired on the same porch just a couple of years earlier.
In this flashback, Mary was lamenting the fact that after several promising dates, a potential relationship had produced another fizzle. At forty years of age, our dear friend, Mary, had come to a crossroads. “Maybe I’ve had it all wrong!” she mused over a cup of after-dinner coffee, “Maybe I was supposed to be a single woman for my life?”
Acquaintances, who judged by appearance, would speculate when they heard news of another failed relationship, “Maybe she’s a perfectionist? No man will ever be good enough for her?!” Well-meaning relatives would wring their hands at family functions querying about her latest prospects. As if Mary were the general manager of an almost-World-Series-contending team like the Cardinals or Brewers, friends and relatives would suggest various free agents who they were certain could take her to the big game! In an attempt to provide comfort, her grandma once told her, “Don’t worry honey, for every old sock in this world, there’s an old shoe out there somewhere.” On our back porch, over a cup of stout coffee, Mary was contemplating her future existence as a shoe-less, forty-year-old sock.
From an analytics standpoint, the gap between Mary’s stated desire for a spouse, and her status of single-without-prospects, made no sense to her traditional Irish family. She was attractive, affable, funny, intelligent, emotionally, and spiritually available to boot. True to Irish Catholic upbringing, from the time of her First Communion, she had prayed that God would bring her the right husband. She wanted her future marriage to grow in soil rich with nutrients provided by God. But she also knew that, God helps those who help themselves. So she did all the marketing and product development stuff that a young adult, then middle-aged woman couldpossibly do. She let friends fix her up on blind dates. She would go to functions where she knew that the conditions were favorable for a chaste, but not too chast encounter. She got herself all hooked up with organizations of people who engaged in hobbies that she liked, reasoning that, while opposites might attract, it’s the similarities that lead to permanence. She continually put the word onto the street that she was looking for Mr. Right. The problem was, that Mr. Wrong was the one who inevitably intercepted her messages and showed up at her doorstep.
On two separate occasions it took her years to discern that a relationship that she had been feeding and watering had failed to grow roots. On one of these occasions, Mary put the ax to the relationship. On the other Mary was the one who eventually got stumped.
This Sunday, my church selected a famous Advent reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah (11: 1-10), God’s chosen people appeared, like my friend Mary, to be stumped. Their leaders had made foolish alliances that resulted in disaster. Their kingdom had been divided. Assyria was threatening to gobble up the whole Middle East. In the midst of this gathering gloom, Isaiah preached a word of hope. The present dark state of things would not be the last word. In this short passage, Isaiah was telling his heart-broken compatriots that their God was capable of making new life sprout from a seemingly useless old tree stump. The seeds of promise planted in the days of Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Raechel and Jacob, Nittzevet and Jesse, were still quietly, and invisibly growing. God wasn’t finished fulfilling the oath. A promised land still awaited. The Divine Tour Guide was just taking them the long way home.
When I finally broke the spell of my flashback,and regained custody of my imagination, I rejoined my contemporaneous colleagues on our porch. There I found my wife, Lisa, with Mary and her brand-spanking-new fiancé, John. After several rounds of back-slapping, hugging, and toasting, the evening gave way to conversation. Mary and John were reflecting back on the circuitous pathway that led them to each other. At the time, their failed relationships and false starts seemed like nothing more than a useless wasteland. But from the vantage point of our back porch, and the new life that was springing up for these two, the seemingly barren past, now appeared to be the necessary fallow season of the growth cycle. Old relationships that seemed like nothing more than false starts were God’s classroom where important lessons of self-understanding and relationship-maintenance were learned. The prayers of a seven-year-old at her First Communion were being answered over all of those decades in some unexpected ways. God had taken Mary and John the long way to their eventual home.
In God’s economy, nothing is ever lost. For those, like Isaiah, who have courage born of hope to look past the appearances, all things work together for the good. Nothing is ever wasted. God gathers up our history, redeems it, and hands it back to us as a gift. Even when we make the wrong decision, God has a way of taking that and fashioning a blessing out of it for us.
Hope, unlike “Pollyannaish” optimism, is capable of acknowledging the dark cloud that accompanies the silver lining. Hope is unafraid to acknowledge the state of being stumped. But hope is that inner voice that tells us to never bet against God’s power to do something new. Hope is that unquenchable place inside that keeps looking for a fresh young shoot to sprout from even the most unexpected of places.