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Mist and dew


Hosea 6:4

“What can I do with you, Ephraim?
    What can I do with you, Judah?
Your love is like the morning mist,
    like the early dew that disappears.

Thought for the day – Mist and dew

I’m an early morning person. I regularly get up at 5 am and occasionally I go out and sit in the garden with a cup of coffee and just sit and enjoy the quiet before the chaos of the kids and ministry begin. But eventually the day comes round and life begins with all the busyness that it entails and that quiet In the mist and dew disappears like our verse this morning.

In context our verse is about the superficiality of the worship of the Israelites. Hosea 6 has that profound verse ‘For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.’ About how going through the motions of worship isn’t enough, and the implication is that our shallow worship dissipates like dew and mist.

But as I was thinking about the quiet of the morning and how life crowds in, I started to wonder if that image of dew and mist is actually a really good image of how life crowds in and our awareness of God does the same thing. He fades away like mist and dew. Of course, God hasn’t disappeared. It’s just our awareness of him that has drifted. Life happens, Chaos reigns, meals are made, kids are dressed, the dog is walked. In the end we may not sense Him anymore but like the evaporated dew and mist haven’t really gone away, neither has God.


This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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