Springs Forth Is A Quiet Verb

The river path at first light with the mist sitting on the water so the far bank is a rumor, and the sound of it is mostly birds and one man's boots.

Three of them out. Flasks. Nobody says much before the bridge.

He is fifty-four.

Nine years. It has not got dramatically worse and it has not got better, and the flatness of that is its own particular difficulty, because there is no crisis to respond to and no improvement to be glad about, and a person cannot mount a campaign against a plateau.

And there is a verse he has been standing on for nine years.

Behold, I will do a new thing.

He believes it. He has believed it since the first year, and every January he half expects something, and every January comes and goes, and he has never once said out loud that the verse has not delivered, because he is not going to be a man who says that.

But he has begun, in the last eighteen months, to skip the page.

If you have a promise you have been standing on for years, you know exactly which January you first noticed, and you know you have never said it to a living soul.

He asks whether you will notice, which tells you what to expect

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the nine years. It is the plateau, which nobody writes about. It costs you the ordinary human right to a crisis, which at least produces attention and casseroles. It costs the January expectation, nine times. It costs you a verse, which is the real theft here, because a page you skip is a page you used to live on. And it costs you a sentence you will not say, which is that you have been standing on a promise and nothing has arrived.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your nine years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if nine flat years have taken you somewhere darker, and the plateau is exactly where that happens to people, tell one living person today. Your doctor, either of the two who walk out with you, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring a flask and do not talk before the bridge.

Now, Isaiah 43, and read the whole verse, because there is a question in the middle of it that changes what you have been waiting for.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Shall ye not know it.

God asks whether they will notice.

Sit with how strange that is. He is announcing the thing Himself, in advance, in the first person, and then He asks whether it is going to be recognized. You do not ask that about a thing that arrives loudly. Nobody asks whether a flood will be noticed. The question is only necessary if the new thing is the kind of thing a person could genuinely miss.

You are being asked a question that tells you what kind of arrival to expect. Isaiah 43:19 has God asking whether it will be known, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a question off a prophet's page and lays it on a river path at first light.

Now the verb, which is the same shape. Spring forth. In Hebrew it is a word from growing things: the way a shoot comes up, which happens continuously and is never observed happening. Nobody has ever watched a seed break the surface. You see the ground, and then at some point you see green, and the transition itself is not available to be witnessed.

You have been watching for an event, and the verb He used is a growing word. That is written into Isaiah 43:19, and His Spirit in you is the one who does the springing in ground you cannot see into.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because nine years of good sentences have already been said on that path.

It does not promise you a change in your circumstances. It does not say your body or your nine years or your next January, and I will not predict them, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and the wilderness in that verse stays a wilderness in the sentence: He makes a way in it, not out of it.

And it is not a swap. Nothing here says the new thing is compensation for the plateau, or that the flatness is good for you. This site does not do that. It is additional. Both things are true at once.

You were never told it would arrive as an event you could point at. Scripture asks whether it will be recognized, and the same Spirit who inspired the question is the one who carries it into a mist that has not lifted yet.