Isaiah 12

Isaiah knew hard times. He's famous for his prophecies about Jesus, but what often gets missed is the context that he made them in.

He lived in a war zone. Assyria came this close to exterminating the Jewish people in his lifetime. Their armies were camped outside Jerusalem before being miraculously destroyed in a way that still baffles historians.

It would have been easy for Isaiah to despair and give up hope. Yet he never did, no matter how bad things got.

After prophesying about the Messiah in Chapters 9-11, he moves into a song of praise in Chapter 12:

In that day you will say:

“I will praise you, Lord. Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me. 

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation.” 

- Isaiah 12:1-2 

Being a Christian is like walking over a bridge. You know in your head that God will catch you if it collapses. But you would still rather not find out.

Then one day you look down and the bridge is gone. Then you have to decide if you are really going to believe any of this stuff.

That point has come for a lot of people in the last few months.

As a Christian, the best thing you can do in these moments is remember the times that God has come through in the past.

I always go back to when I first became a believer. I was 26. I was an editor and a writer at SB Nation while making money on the side writing about basketball for a few other websites.

My job was more than a paycheck. It was my life. I had spent the four years since college scratching and clawing to establish myself in the industry. I didn't have much else going for me. I didn't have any money. I lived in a run down one bedroom apartment. I hadn't dated anyone in years. The only thing I had to hang my hat on was that I had a cool job.

Then, all of a sudden, I didn't.

It was my own fault. The college basketball editor job at SBN came open, and I assumed that I would get it. After all, I was the best.

When I didn't, I began calling around to see what other jobs were out there for me. I even told my bosses what I was doing because obviously they would realize their mistake in passing over me.

You can already guess what happened. They fired me like it was nothing. No severance. Nothing. And all those other jobs that I had been talking too? None of them came through.

I ended up getting a part-time job stocking shelves on weekends. We would drive around to grocery stores in the morning, count the beer that had been sold the day before, and then go to the back of the store and replace it.

The funny part is that working in online media paid so little that I could make more money doing that in 20-25 hours a week than I could blogging and editing for 40.

The hard part was swallowing my pride. I went to a private high school with the sons of CEOs and politicians. They used to always tell us about how we were the future leaders of society. Do you remember in The Facebook Movie when Mark Zuckerberg is mad about not getting into one of the Finals clubs at Harvard? I knew kids in those. And here I was punching a clock with people who never went to college.

I prayed and prayed about what to do next. I felt like He told me to start a blog. It was an odd thing to do in 2014. Blogs had already died. Everyone was on social media. He might as well have told me to start a newspaper. Or a beeper company.

Nothing happened for a long, long time. My days were spent writing, stocking shelves, and going to church. I guess you could say it was my own version of Paul's time in Arabia after his encounter on the road to Damascus. There aren't many stories about those years in the Bible.

About nine months after I was fired, I was praying for a friend who had just broken up with the girl he thought he would marry. I could tell what was wrong. He was mourning not just the loss of the relationship but the pieces of his identity that he had put into it.

So I just kept telling him that she didn't define who he was. That his identity came from his relationship with God and not this girl.

And then I realized that I was really praying for myself. I had spent my whole life thinking that I had to be "successful". I had worked so hard to be somebody. But none of that stuff actually mattered. None of it would make me happy. I could be happy because God loved me. That was enough.

I was free.

Fast forward two years. I got an email from an editor about working for a start-up. The first thing he said was that he read my blog every day.


via GIPHY

I wish I could say that was the end of my story. That I learned an important lesson about identity and never putting too much of myself into my job. But that's not how life works. I've had to learn that lesson again and again over the last four years.

God has always been good to me, even as I kept making the same mistakes. He has always answered my prayers.

I was praying about getting into online dating right about the same time that I joined The Ringer. I felt like God told me not to do anything until a church-wide community service project that happened a few weeks later.

The project came and went without much happening. After it was over, a couple of us went to an outdoor patio. There was a pretty girl there who wanted to play sand volleyball with us.

Fast forward four years. Now we have a son.

Jackson Dean Tjarks was born on Friday. He’s in the 98th percentile for height and he’s incredibly cute! pic.twitter.com/GEflnApYAZ

— Jonathan Tjarks (@JonathanTjarks) March 23, 2020

In that day you will say: 

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. 

Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.” 

- Isaiah 12:4-5