It Could Not Grip
The word for Sunday, August 23, 2026 is It Could Not Grip.
The anchor verses are Isaiah 42:3 and Daniel 10:12.
On the eighth of August a couple in a village in England found a small bird lying stunned in the road. It had been hit by a car. They picked it up and called somebody and drove it to a wildlife hospital.
It was a whitethroat. A little warbler, gray and brown, nothing showy about it. They fly up from Africa every spring, spend the summer in Britain, and go back in the autumn. This one had crossed a continent and a sea to get there.
The staff looked it over and found almost nothing wrong. No broken wing. No injury to speak of.
The problem was in its feet.
They had curled up and would not open. Nerve damage, or ligament damage, they could not say for certain. The bird could not grip.
Understand what that means for a bird. Gripping is nearly the whole job of those feet. A bird that cannot close its toes around a branch cannot perch, cannot rest, cannot hold on to anything. It can fly perfectly well and it has nowhere to land.
The staff could not simply make the feet grip again.
So they made it a pair of shoes.
Cardboard, cut small. Cotton wool tucked between the foot and the cardboard for cushioning. Micropore tape to hold it all together. A woman named Amy Blower, who leads the animal care team, described them as sandals.
They were not fixing anything. They were holding the feet flat and open in the shape a foot is supposed to be, so that when the nerve came back the toes would still know where they belonged.
She said they had used the trick before on baby birds, though usually for a different problem entirely. Nobody designed this. Somebody adapted it.
The bird was doing well when they last said anything about it. The plan was to let it go.
Now open the forty-second chapter of Isaiah, which is a description of the servant GOD is sending, and hear what the description leads with.
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.
A reed that has been stepped on is finished as a reed. It will not play. The ordinary thing to do with it is snap it and throw it away, because it is only a piece of grass and there are more in the marsh.
A wick with no flame left, only smoke, is done. You pinch it out and put in a new one.
The prophet says HE does neither.
That is not sentiment. It is a statement about how GOD handles things that have stopped working. HE does not clear them out. HE is not looking for the part of you that still performs.
And HE is the one who made the reed in the first place. HE knows what it was for and what happened to it and how long the repair takes. A person walking past sees a piece of grass bent over in the mud. GOD sees something HE made, in a condition HE understands, on a timeline HE is not in a hurry about.
There is a verse in Daniel that says something in the same direction, and it comes at the end of three weeks of a man praying and hearing nothing.
Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, thy words were heard.
From the first day. The answer arrived on day twenty one. The hearing happened on day one.
He spent three weeks believing nothing was happening. Something had been happening since the morning he started.
You may be in a stretch where the thing you are supposed to be able to do is exactly the thing you cannot do right now.
Hold on. Keep faith. Stay steady. People say those words to you and they are not wrong, and you cannot make your hands close around any of it. The grip is gone and nobody can tell you when it comes back.
GOD is not standing over that waiting for you to perform. HE has never once snapped a bruised reed, and HE is not going to start with you.
The grip comes back or it does not. That part is not in your hands, which is a hard sentence and also a true one. What is settled is who is holding the shape while you wait.
The bird did not heal itself and nobody healed it either. Somebody held its feet open, in cardboard and tape, in the shape they were made to be, until the bird could hold on again by itself.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who cannot grip the thing everybody says to hold on to.
- 🙏 To the one who has been praying three weeks into silence.
- 🙏 To the one who has been treated as finished by people who never asked.
- 🙏 To the one holding somebody else open in cardboard and tape this morning.
Grace and Peace.