The Free Way Isaiah 43:16-19 & Philippians 3:4b-14
The Free Way
Isaiah 43:16-19 & Philippians 3:4b-14
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
March 22, 2026
Thus says the Lord,
who makes a way in the sea,
a path in the mighty waters,
17 who brings out chariot and horse,
army and warrior;
they lie down; they cannot rise;
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
18 Do not remember the former things
or consider the things of old.
19 I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
______
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ,[c] the righteousness from God based on faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
______
Most of us know someone like Tom.
In the film The Way, Tom is a successful American ophthalmologist — practical, competent, in control. His adult son Daniel is the dreamer, the wanderer, the one who never quite settled down. Their relationship is strained by that difference. Daniel wants to walk the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain. Tom thinks it’s impractical. They argue. Daniel goes anyway.
And on the very first day of the Camino, Daniel is killed in a storm.
Tom flies to France to collect his son’s body, and in a grief-stricken, almost defiant act, he decides to walk the pilgrimage himself — carrying Daniel’s ashes. What begins as a gesture of love gradually reveals itself as something far more complicated. Tom isn’t just carrying his son’s remains. He’s carrying the full weight of their unresolved relationship — the arguments, the disappointments, the conversations they never had, the roads not taken together. He’s carrying his identity: successful doctor, practical man, someone who plays it safe, someone who had his life figured out.
The Camino doesn’t let him hold that identity for long.
Most of us aren’t walking across Spain. But most of us are carrying something — a fixed story about who we are, who we’ve been, what we deserve, what’s possible for us. And today, two ancient texts and one unlikely pilgrimage invite us to ask a single, searching question: What if the way to freedom requires setting that story down?
Listen to what the prophet Isaiah says to a people in exile:
“Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
The prophet opens by reminding Israel of God’s greatest hits — the Exodus, the parted sea, the drowned Egyptian army. It’s a powerful memory. The Exodus was the defining story of Israel’s identity. It was the story they told at every Passover table, the story their children memorized, the story that held them together as a people.
But then comes the pivot that should stop us cold.
Do not remember the former things.
This is extraordinary. God isn’t dismissing the past. The Exodus was real. The deliverance was real. But the people have turned their greatest liberation story into a ceiling. They keep waiting for that again — the same miracle, the same shape of salvation, the same parting of the same kind of sea. And in their backward gaze, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror of their sacred history, they are missing what God is doing right now: a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. Not a sea parting, but something new. Something they don’t have a category for yet.
The fixed story — even a sacred fixed story — had become a prison.
Now hear Paul, writing from a prison of a different kind:
“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
A few verses earlier in this same letter, Paul has just catalogued his credentials: circumcised on the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless under the law. This is an identity built over a lifetime, brick by careful brick. A resume that would make any synagogue, any community, any family proud.
And he calls it rubbish.
Not because it wasn’t real. Not because it didn’t matter. But because clinging to it — making it the foundation of his identity, the measure of his worth, the lens through which he interpreted everything — was costing him something infinitely more valuable: the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. So Paul makes a choice that is almost athletic in its physicality. Forgetting what lies behind. Straining forward. I press on.
Paul is not suppressing the past. He is releasing his grip on it. There is a world of difference between those two things. And in that release, the free way opens before him.
Both texts are naming the same obstacle to freedom. Not external circumstance. Not the hardness of the road. Not the enemies arrayed against us. The obstacle is our attachment to a fixed story — about who we are, about what God can do, about how salvation is supposed to look.
I have a dear clergy friend — I’ll call him James — who understands this in a way that is both painful and illuminating.
James served as an associate pastor at a large, thriving church. He was beloved by the congregation, respected for his gifts, admired for all he had built and contributed. After many good years there, he resigned to become the solo pastor of another congregation, where he served faithfully for eight or nine years.
Then the senior pastor of his former church announced his retirement. People remembered James. They reached out — would he consider coming back, this time as the lead pastor? One thing led to another. James moved his family back to that town, back to that church he had loved and known. He arrived excited, full of hope, stepping into what felt like a homecoming.
Except it wasn’t home. Not anymore.
Things had shifted during the years of his absence. And a couple of staff members — unhappy, threatened, entrenched — made it their mission to undermine him. They spread discontent among the congregation. They told stories. They whispered. They lied. Pretty soon, James was no longer the beloved golden boy who had come home in triumph. He was the target of conflict and discord, his reputation quietly shredded among the most influential voices in the church.
He made the necessary staff changes. He tried to stop the bleeding. But the damage was done — to his standing, to his ability to lead, to the possibility of the future he had imagined. He had to move on.
When James told me this story, his heartbreak was obvious. But what struck me — what I have not forgotten — was the lesson he named through his own pain. He said: “The destruction of my reputation was a dismantling of the false self I had been carrying. It was a forced correction to the story of past achievement I had been telling myself — the story that said I was the beloved golden boy, that my gifts and accomplishments would always precede me, that I could walk back into that church and pick up where I left off.”
He had carried that story like Tom carried the ashes — as a kind of love, as a kind of hope.
And the Camino of that painful season had stripped it away.
James didn’t say this bitterly. He said it with the hard-won clarity of someone who has been freed from something he didn’t know was a cage.
Thomas Merton called this the false self — the identity we construct from achievement, wounds, roles, and reputation. We don’t build it maliciously. We build it for entirely reasonable purposes: survival, belonging, self-protection, the basic human need to know who we are and where we stand. But Merton was unflinching about its ultimate effect. The false self, he wrote, is a prison we mistake for a home.
And the stories that constitute the false self come in several varieties. Most of us will recognize ourselves in at least one.
There is the story of past achievement — James’s story, Paul’s story before Damascus, the story of every person you’ve known who had to tell you their resume. I have earned my place. I have built something real. I know who I am because of what I have accomplished. The danger here isn’t exactly pride. It’s calcification. When our identity is anchored in what we have achieved, we become curiously unable to receive anything we haven’t earned — including grace. And we become threatened by any season that doesn’t confirm the story.
There is the story of past wound. This is what was done to me. This is why I am the way I am. There is legitimate truth here — our wounds are real, and they deserve acknowledgment. But both Merton and Henri Nouwen observed that we can become so identified with our suffering that it quietly becomes load-bearing in our sense of self. To release it feels like losing ourselves entirely. The wound becomes our most familiar companion, the explanation for everything, the reason the new thing God is doing can’t quite apply to us.
There is the story of past failure. I tried that before. I know how this ends. The Israelites had this one. Exile had taught them brutal lessons about limitation and loss. God’s response — do you not perceive it? — implies something important: perception itself requires willingness. You cannot see the new path if you are certain that the ground ahead holds nothing but what you have already walked.
And there is perhaps the subtlest story of all: the story of who God is. The Israelites weren’t only attached to their own history — they were attached to their theology. God works like this. God looks like that. God parts seas. God doesn’t make rivers in a desert. But the God of Isaiah refuses to be domesticated by any previous performance. Richard Rohr names this with characteristic directness: the false self doesn’t just shape how we see ourselves — it shapes how we see everything, including God. Our image of God gets frozen at whatever point our formation stopped. And a frozen God cannot lead us anywhere new.
So the free way is blocked not primarily by our circumstances but by our stories. The question becomes: how does the grip loosen?
Return to Tom on the Camino.
Somewhere in the middle of the journey — exhausted, blistered, stripped of every familiar competency — something in Tom begins to crack open. He is not in control. He cannot fix this with expertise or efficiency. He cannot diagnose and treat his way through grief. The Camino has a way of dismantling the false versions of self we arrive with.
Back to Paul in his writing to the Philippians. The forgetting he describes is not amnesia. It is divestment — an active, repeated, ongoing choice to release his grip on the identity that once defined him. Notice he says I press on — present tense, continuous action. This is not a one-time transaction. It is a practice. Every day, releasing the former things. Every day, straining forward.
And this is precisely where hope enters the picture.
Father Henri Nouwen taught that genuine hope — the deep, sustaining, unshakeable kind — is only possible when we stop performing and start receiving. When we allow our identity to rest not on what we have done or suffered or achieved, but on the bedrock reality that we are the beloved of God. That belovedness is not conditional. It is not revocable. It is not dependent on our reputation remaining intact, our accomplishments being recognized, or our wounds being healed. It is the truest thing about us.
And when we know it — really know it, in our bones — the false self loosens its grip. Because it no longer has to work so hard to keep us safe. The story we’ve been defending so fiercely turns out not to be the most important story after all.
I wonder: what story are you carrying that has quietly become a prison? What fixed identity — achievement or wound, failure or frozen theology — might God be inviting you to hold more loosely? Not to erase. Not to deny. But to release your grip on, so that your hands are free to receive what is already, even now, springing forth?
Tom finishes the Camino. He scatters Daniel’s ashes at the great Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. And then — in the film’s final, quietly luminous scene — he keeps walking. He doesn’t book a flight home. The way that opened to carry his grief has become something else entirely: a way forward he didn’t know he needed, into a person he couldn’t have predicted becoming.
He arrived on the Camino defined by a loss, gripping a story about a relationship that could no longer be repaired. He leaves as someone being made new.
That is resurrection logic. That is, in every sense of the word, the free way.
God said to a defeated and exiled people: I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?
Paul said to anyone with ears to hear: Forgetting what lies behind, I press on.
Merton said the truest self is not the one we construct through decades of striving and self-protection — it is the self hidden in God, waiting to be discovered when we finally stop defending the one we built.
And Nouwen said that when we know — truly know — that we are the beloved, we are free. Free to fail. Free to let go. Free to move forward without the crushing weight of a story that was never, finally, large enough to hold us.
My friend James is in a new place of ministry now. Quieter, maybe. More seasoned, certainly. He carries the Camino of that painful season not as a wound that defines him, but as a teacher that freed him — from a story that was too small, into a grace that is large enough for whatever comes next.
The free way is not somewhere else. It is not reserved for people with lighter burdens or better circumstances. It springs forth — the text says now it springs forth — in the wilderness. In the desert. On the Camino of your actual life, with its actual griefs and actual failures and actual unresolved relationships.
You are not the story you have been telling about yourself.
You are the beloved of God. And the way is open.
Press on.