Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40:30-31
Even the Strong Ones
Even the strong ones fall over, and that's where Isaiah starts, so it helps to know the room he's saying it in. Isaiah 40 begins a long section written to people living in exile, and it opens with "Comfort, comfort my people." These are people a long way from home with no clear route back, and this promise is spoken to them.
Watch who Isaiah picks for his example, because he had easier options available. He could have said that the sick grow tired, or that the old stumble, and nobody would have argued with him. Instead he goes and finds the youths and the young men, the people at the peak of what a human body can do, the ones who never seem to need a rest at all. Even they get tired. Even they fall over.
So the comparison here isn't between strong people and weak people, which is how we usually hear it. Isaiah takes the strongest people available and shows us the bottom of them, because he's about to talk about a strength that comes from somewhere else entirely.
To renew here carries the sense of an exchange, the way you'd change out of clothes you've been wearing all day, so it isn't that God tops us up whenever we start running low. It's a trade. You hand over the strength you've run out of, and he gives you his.
Then comes the list, and the list runs the wrong direction. Soar, run, walk. You'd expect Isaiah to build up toward the eagle, and instead he starts there and steps all the way down to a man on foot.
Walking Is the Hard One
He steps down because walking is where most of life actually happens.
Soaring is the day you feel God near you and you'd tell anybody who asked about it. Running is the stretch where you're tired but still moving and you can at least see the finish from where you are. Walking is the ninth month of the same trouble, when nothing has changed and nothing is dramatic but you get up and do the day again anyway.
That's the woman going back into the same hospital room on day nine, carrying the same bag she carried on day one. That's the man who has sent out forty applications sitting down at the kitchen table to write the forty-first. That's the parent praying for a grown child who isn't calling back, praying the same prayer they were praying in the spring.
None of that ever gets a story told about it afterward, and Isaiah puts it last on purpose, and then he attaches the same promise to it. Walk and not be faint.
If this is where you've been living, I wrote two other pieces related to this one. Make Every Effort to Rest is about ceasing from self-reliant striving, which is the same trade Isaiah describes here, and Surviving a Spiritual Dry Season walks through the long stretch itself.
So if you're in the walking part right now, you haven't fallen behind the people who are soaring. You're in the part of the passage Isaiah cared enough about to save for the end, and the offer he makes there is the same one he made at the top. Hand him the strength you've run out of, because he was never asking you to go find more of your own.
Prayer
Jesus, we're tired, and some of us have been tired for a long time now. Thank you that you already know that, and that you never once told us to manufacture strength we don't have. We give you what's left of ours today, and we ask you for yours. For the ones among us who are walking and not soaring, hold them steady and keep them from fainting on the way. Help us to wait on you, and to trust that you're close to us while we wait. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.