When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you. Isaiah 43:2
Sometimes life corners us, with no good place to go.
A problem presses from one side, fear from the other. You pray, you think, you choose wisely—and still there seems to be no good option. A poet once wrote, “When I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, let me be water.”[1] Water doesn’t fight the rock head-on. It doesn’t deny the narrow place. It flows, adapts, and keeps moving without losing its nature.
Vaneetha Rendall Risner knows this narrow place. Polio left her with lasting paralysis. Then came four miscarriages, the death of an infant son, progressive paralysis, and her husband leaving her alone to raise two daughters. Nothing was fixable. Yet she wrote, “Knowing God in my pain has changed everything for me.”[2] She didn’t escape the narrow place. She learned to move with God, through it.
In the Bible book of Isaiah, God says, “When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown.” (Isaiah 43:2). Not if. When. Many of us think faith means pushing harder, with more certainty. But God meets us not when we overpower our circumstances, but when we trust Him enough to move through them. Faith sometimes looks like endurance. Like staying soft when life is hard—refusing to become bitter or closed off.
You can’t always fix a situation or force clarity. But you can choose to trust that God is present in the narrow place, shaping you gently, not crushing you. Instead of asking, “How do I escape this?” try asking, “How can I move through this with God?”
[1] Roedel, John. Instagram, n.d. Accessed January 2026. https://www.instagram.com/johnroedel.
[2] Vaneetha Rendall Risner, Walking Through Fire (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2021). See also vaneetha.com.
