Isaiah 43 belongs to the second half of the book, addressed to Israelites who have lost everything — temple, land, kings — and are sitting in Babylonian exile. They are not being told to be brave; they are being told whose they are. The verbs stack up: created, formed, redeemed, called, named. Each one undoes a piece of the captivity narrative. Babylon has unmade them; the LORD insists he has not. The waters and the fire are not hypothetical — they are the Red Sea and the furnace of Daniel's friends, memory shaped into promise.

From the writers we read together

Teresa of Ávila

Spanish Carmelite reformer and mystic (1515-1582)

Teresa wrote those nine words on a bookmark she carried inside her psalter. They are the distilled form of a life that had passed through real waters — chronic illness, the Inquisition's suspicion, founding monasteries in towns that did not want her, and decades of prayer that often felt like nothing. She is not telling frightened people that nothing is happening; she is telling them that whatever is happening is passing, and the One who is not passing has hold of them. Isaiah 43 says the same thing in a longer line. The waters are real. The rivers are real. They will not overwhelm.

Teresa's pastoral instinct is to pull the soul's attention off the flood and onto the One walking in it. Notice that Isaiah does not promise the waters will not come; he promises company in them. Mετὰ σοῦ εἰμι — I am with you. That is the whole sentence beneath Teresa's bookmark. Most of us, when we are afraid, want the river removed. Teresa would say: ask instead to know who is in it with you. The river goes; the Redeemer remains; and on the far side you will find that the only thing the fire burned off was what was never yours to begin with.