There is a passage in Isaiah where God is talking about how he's going to make the crooked path straight, and he's going to create like the smooth road for us.
You know, and smooth roads are super important in farming times and times without cars.
They're very, very, very beneficial. And the way that he builds these smooth roads is that he brings the mountains low and he brings the valleys high.
So the people, and if you think about it in the human context, what God wants is for us to be partners. God wants for the road to be equal, to be a level playing field.
And that means that the people who are up high, who might have things easier, they need to get down in the trenches.
But the people who have been down low, they need to learn that their voices matter. And they need to become a little bit more important.
And what often happens in the church is that we give the wrong advice to the right people.
Because in the Bible, there's lots of verses that talk about bringing the mountains low, about how we're supposed to sacrifice, we're supposed to forgive, we're supposed to love one another, we're supposed to not think of our own interests, but also think of the interests of others, right? Like there's lots and lots of verses that can bring the mountains low. But there's also a lot of verses that can bring the valleys up.
You know, verses about injustice and about caring for the poor and about caring for those that are lower down, and about how we're not supposed to play favorites and how we're supposed to, you know, care for others. But what often happens is that we teach those who are already high up the messages that let them stay high, and then we teach those that are low the messages that would keep them low. So instead of teaching the low people, hey, you know, justice matters, you get to be risen higher.
No, we teach them you need to forgive more, you need to love more, you need to sacrifice more. And we teach those who maybe have more, hey, you know, God made you to be a leader.
You're supposed to speak out, you're supposed to do all these things.
And so we're not leveling the playing field, we're entrenching these things.
So instead of creating this lovely, you know, path that makes things easy, that makes life joyful, we're actually reinforcing the crooked paths.
-Sheila Gregoire
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