This is what the LORD says: “Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. – Isaiah 56:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 30, 2017): Isaiah 56

Sometimes I wish that life worked like some movies. I mean, in the Westerns when the going gets tough you know the cavalry is just over the next hill. Or maybe in a Science Fiction universe, the Captains can run their ship into an opposing craft that has been persecuting them only to find that the reset button has been pushed and everything has returned back to normal. Fiction gives us a way of making sure that everything turns out right – if that is what we want to do.

But life’s reset button is often hard to find. We wish that we could be assured that in the middle of our worst days that the reset button is at the ready. But our reality doesn’t allow for such dreaming. Our reality says that we need to do things that will get results. And often the only way we can do that is to cut some corners. So we do. We convince ourselves that it just needs to be that way. After all, we live in the real world – and not an ideal moral world that someone has dreamed up.

M*A*S*H’s Father Mulcahy summed up the feeling when he talked about learning to live with one foot in the real world and one foot on Plato’s ideal plain. We don’t want to lose the ideal – but we have to do what we have to do to survive in our real world.

Isaiah’s message is a little different. His message was to persist in what is good – persist on the ideal plain – trusting that the day would come when the ideal plain is all that will matter as God’s righteousness is revealed.

Do what is right, knowing that your salvation is at hand. After all, the cavalry is about to come over the hill.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 57