Read Isaiah 43:19–21
ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4 NLT)
I have loved volcanoes since I was a boy. I had a book about them that I returned to repeatedly, studying the pictures and learning about the devastation—and transformation—they could produce. Two volcanoes especially captured my imagination: Mount Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens.
Vesuvius possessed the mystery of the ancient world. Its eruption in 79 CE buried entire communities beneath ash and volcanic debris, capturing human fear and imagination for nearly two millennia. As a boy, I was fascinated by the pictures and by the story of a thriving world suddenly entombed beneath the earth.
Mount St. Helens felt different because its eruption was not ancient history. It happened in 1980, during my lifetime. The blast leveled forests, displaced wildlife, and left hundreds of square miles looking barren. The photographs showed a landscape so thoroughly devastated that it seemed impossible for life ever to flourish there again.
Perhaps that was what fascinated me most. Volcanoes reveal both the terrifying power of destruction and creation’s astonishing capacity for renewal.
There is nothing romantic about the devastation they cause. Landscapes disappear. Habitats collapse. Lives are lost. What once sustained life becomes difficult to recognize.
Yet devastation is not the only thing volcanoes produce. As volcanic material weathers over time, it releases minerals into the earth. What initially buried the landscape can eventually contribute to remarkably fertile soil. New plants take root. Animals return. Entire ecosystems begin developing across ground that once appeared incapable of sustaining anything.
The landscape does not return unchanged. The forest growing around Mount St. Helens is not the same forest that stood there before the eruption. New life does not erase the devastation or restore everything that was lost. It emerges from altered ground.
Volcanoes remind us of a truth embedded within creation: destruction may radically change the landscape without gaining the authority to determine its final future.
The people receiving the words of Isaiah 43 understood what it meant for their world to erupt. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple had been destroyed. Many had been carried into exile in Babylon. Their political, religious, and communal lives had been torn apart. They were not enduring a temporary inconvenience. They were living amid the collapse of the world they had known.
Into that devastation, a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition announces that God is making a road through the wilderness and creating rivers in the wasteland.
God does not deny that the wasteland exists. Scripture does not tell the exiles to rename devastation as blessing, pretend that displacement did not wound them, or become grateful for everything they had suffered. Babylonian exile was not good merely because God could bring life from it. Faith does not require us to call destruction holy before we are permitted to hope.
Instead, Isaiah announces that devastation does not exhaust God’s creative possibilities.
Psalm 23 offers a similar promise: “Even when I walk through the darkest valley…” The familiar language of the King James Version calls it “the valley of the shadow of death.” Either way, the psalm does not promise that faithful people will never enter death-shadowed terrain. It promises that we do not enter it alone.
The crucial word is through.
God’s presence does not always remove the valley or immediately return us to where we were before entering it. Sometimes the only faithful path leads directly through terrain we would rather avoid. Yet Isaiah adds something astonishing to that promise. God not only accompanies the people through the wasteland; God brings water into it.
God creates the conditions through which life can emerge in the very place that appeared incapable of sustaining it.
Isaiah says that even the wild animals will honor God because God provides water in the wilderness. On the surface, this is a beautiful picture of creation receiving God’s provision. Within prophetic language, however, wild animals often carried an additional meaning. Jackals, ostriches, and other wilderness creatures were associated with abandoned ruins. Their presence indicated that human settlements had collapsed and cultivated places had reverted to wilderness.
They were signs that civilization had left and desolation had taken over.
Isaiah reverses the image. The wild animals no longer testify only to abandonment. They become witnesses to renewal. The creatures most closely associated with the wasteland are among the first to recognize that water is flowing there.
There may even be some prophetic irony in that. God asks the people, “Do you not see it?” Meanwhile, the wild animals are already drinking.
Creation recognizes God’s provision while human beings are still deciding whether it counts.
Perhaps that is because we frequently expect renewal to look like restoration to a former condition. We want the same forest, the same structures, the same communities, the same bodies, the same relationships, or the same versions of ourselves we knew before everything erupted. We pray for new life while quietly defining it as the recovery of the old one.
But God does not promise the exiles a replica of their past. By the time the first exiles returned, nearly fifty years had passed since Jerusalem’s destruction—and about sixty since the first major deportation. Many returnees had been born in Babylon and knew Judah only through inherited stories. Meanwhile, Judah had not remained empty. Those who survived there had cultivated the land, raised families, and formed lives of their own. The return brought competing claims about land, belonging, and authority—not an uncomplicated homecoming. There was no road back to the world as it had been. God would have to make a new one.
The Church must hear this when looking at struggling congregations, neglected neighborhoods, wounded communities, and people whose lives no longer fit familiar expectations. Institutions often survey altered ground, calculate what has been lost, and conclude that nothing valuable can grow there. Resources are withdrawn. Communities are abandoned. People are treated as liabilities because they cannot reproduce what existed before.
God sees differently.
God sees the minerals hidden within the ash. God sees water beneath the wasteland. God sees ecosystems that do not yet resemble anything we recognize. And those dismissed as wild, unwanted, unrespectable, or out of place may be the first to drink from the river and recognize that God has not abandoned the terrain.
The same is true within us. Some experiences alter us permanently. We may never become the person we were before the eruption, and healing does not require us to do so. God’s new creation is not confined to reconstructing an earlier version of our lives. Grace can nourish something genuinely new—something shaped by what we have survived without being defined solely by it.
The ash remains part of the ground, but it does not prevent the ground from becoming fertile.
God leads us through the valley. God remains with us in the wasteland. Then, sometimes slowly and beyond the timetable we would choose, living water begins to flow through the devastation.
The wasteland is real.
But it does not get the final word.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God does not always restore the former landscape; sometimes God creates a new ecosystem within it.PRAYER
Life-giving God, remain with us when the landscape of our lives is altered beyond recognition. Lead us through death-shadowed valleys, help us perceive the rivers you are creating, and give us courage to welcome life even when it does not resemble what came before. Amen.
Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).