Isaiah 26:17 · World English Bible
Isaiah 26:17 Meaning Just as a Woman with Child
Just as a woman with child, who draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain and cries out in her pangs, so we have been before you, Yahweh.
What does Isaiah 26:17 mean?
Deep in a person, something new slowly takes shape. It grows for a long time unnoticed, the way a child grows before anyone feels it move.
From the Psychoanalysis reading below.
Isaiah 26:17 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Psychoanalysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis
Deep in a person, something new slowly takes shape. It grows for a long time unnoticed, the way a child grows before anyone feels it move. Then it presses to be born, and that pressure is real pain, because the old self has to give way to make room.
The same thing happens here. These people are not only suffering; they carry something that has reached its time and must come out. They cry to God because a birth like this cannot be forced or stopped by will. The pain is the sign that new life in them is finally arriving.
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Psychoanalysis lens
Live Isaiah 26:17 today
- If you have been in a hard stretch, stop asking what you are doing wrong and ask instead what is being born. Write a page about it tonight with no plan to fix anything.
- When a friend is deep in something painful, skip the advice and the silver lining. Sit with them and say "this is really hard, and you are in the middle of it," and let that be the whole visit.
- At work, when a pressure you cannot control is squeezing you, stop bracing to be done with it. Breathe once and let it be a passage instead of a problem for the next hour.
What in me is pressing to come out, that I keep treating as something gone wrong?
The same truth in other traditions
Zen
The teachers say the great doubt before an opening feels like a ball of hot iron you can neither swallow nor spit out. That unbearable pressure is not failure, it is how close you are.
Sufism · Rumi
Rumi says the wound is the place where the light enters, and that the soul grows by being broken open. Do not try to seal what is opening.
Taoism · Zhuangzi
When Zhuangzi's wife died he stopped his weeping, seeing her change as the seasons change into one another. The old form has to be given up, and no amount of willing hurries it or holds it back.
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