Isaiah 40 (the hard part)

"A voice says, 'Cry out.'

And I say, 'What shall I cry?'

'All people are like grass, and all human faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.  

The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them.  

Surely the people are grass. 

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever."

Amid the comfort and release from sin and Glory of the LORD, there are these lines.  Difficult to understand not least because the Hebrew text does not use quotation marks so it is only with the help of scholars (who disagree among themselves) that we are able to reproduce who is crying out what to whom and why.

This is a sobering word about human limitations, frailty and, in a word, mortality.  Of course it ends with a twist as God's eternality reshapes our own lives.  Finding music that does all that was a trick.  I had to dig into an album entitled Lent to find it. But then, that is appropriate right?  What the season of Lent is to Easter so is Advent to Christmas.  It is a moment for reflection, for the cultivation of true wisdom.

True wisdom, as defined by John Calvin, "consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and knowledge of self."  This song captures that tension well.  And it is not an inappropriate meditation for this season.  As winter descend in darkness, we long for the coming light.