Pip: There is a particular kind of sermon note that starts with a king dying and ends with the cosmos, and Pastor Goforth has written one of those.

Mara: This episode follows a single extended reflection on Isaiah 6 — the vision, the confession, the call — and how a moment of personal grief becomes the doorway to encountering God.

Pip: Let’s get into it.

I Saw The Lord — Isaiah 6 and the Shape of Encounter

Mara: The post opens with a disarming admission: most of us will never see God with our eyes or hear his voice with our ears, and the question it sits with is what it actually looks like to “see the Lord” through Scripture and Spirit.

Pip: And the framework offered is five words — Posture, Preparation, Provision, Persistence, Presence — which sounds like a conference handout until you realize the post is using them to trace something genuinely personal.

Mara: The anchor passage is Isaiah 6, and the post sets it up through the detail most readers skip. Isaiah and King Uzziah were likely related — uncle or cousin — and Uzziah reigned for fifty-two years before a catastrophic fall: he attempted a priestly sacrifice forbidden to kings, and God struck him with leprosy. His final days were spent, as the post puts it, “in separation, disease, and disgrace.”

Pip: So when Isaiah says “in the year that King Uzziah died,” he is not giving us a timestamp. He is telling us he was grieving.

Mara: That’s exactly the point the post makes. It notes the phrase is “in the year” — not the day, not the week — because loss takes time. Isaiah came to the temple humbled, and what he found there is the famous vision: the Lord seated high and lifted up, seraphim calling out, the room shaking.

Pip: And his first response is not awe. It is collapse.

Mara: The post quotes directly: “Woe is me… I am ruined.” And then the confession — “I am a man of unclean lips, among a people of unclean lips.” The post wonders honestly whether those unclean lips had been asking hard, accusatory questions during the year of grief.

Pip: Which is where the post gets genuinely vulnerable — there is a story about losing a close friend, sitting in an office, and sensing a quiet question: are you going to figure this out? The answer was no, and the pivot that followed was an invitation simply to worship alongside the friend who was already doing exactly that.

Mara: The sequence the post traces is deliberate: see the Lord, then see yourself, then confess — and only then does the voice come. “Then I heard the Voice of the Lord… Who will go for us? I said, Here I am, send me.” The post reads that progression into Psalms 121 through 124 as well, a chain of lifted eyes and arriving help.

Pip: Look up, look in, listen, respond — that is the post’s closing line, and it earns it.

Mara: The through-line here is that encounter with God tends to move through grief and honesty before it arrives at commission.

Pip: Which means “Here I am, send me” is not a brave opening line. It is what comes out the other side of something harder.