The Shadow Goes Backward

The king was dying and he knew it.

Isaiah had come with the message: Set your house in order. You will die and not live.

The prophet left.

Hezekiah turned his face to the wall.

He wept. He prayed. He reminded God of how he had walked before Him.

Isaiah had not even made it to the middle court of the palace when God told him to turn around.

Go back. Tell him he has fifteen more years.

The king would be healed. The city would be delivered from Assyria.

But Hezekiah asked for a sign.

Isaiah asked him: Which direction should the shadow move — forward ten degrees, or backward?

Hezekiah said backward.

Because, he said, it is easy for the shadow to go forward.

And the shadow went backward.

Ten degrees.

On the sundial of Ahaz.

The sun moved the wrong way.

Or time moved. Or something moved.

The writer doesn't explain how.

Just that it happened.

And Hezekiah lived fifteen more years.

He had fifteen years he shouldn't have had.

Every morning he woke up in those years, the shadow was proof.

That time had been given back.

That the sun had moved backward for him.

That God had heard him weeping against a wall.

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