The Runner From Mogadishu

In 2017, a young Somali woman named Sahro walked into a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, after three weeks on foot. She carried almost nothing — a plastic bag, a torn blanket, and a piece of paper with an address in Nairobi where her sister was alive. Her sister, whom everyone had believed dead for two years.

Sahro moved through the camp telling everyone she passed. She told the women at the water station. She told the men waiting for ration cards. She told strangers sitting under acacia trees. "My sister is alive. I have seen her face." People wept who had never met her sister. They celebrated someone else's impossible news because in a place defined by loss, any word of life was everyone's victory.

Isaiah paints this same scene on a grander scale. A messenger comes running across the mountains toward Jerusalem — a city that has known nothing but exile, silence, and the absence of God. And the messenger's words shatter everything: "Your God reigns!" The watchmen on the walls hear it first and break into singing. Then the broken ruins themselves join the chorus.

Notice that Isaiah doesn't say the feet are beautiful because they are strong or swift. They are beautiful because of what they carry. The good news of the Almighty's redemption transforms even the dust-caked feet of the messenger into something glorious. Every Christian who has ever whispered hope into a hopeless place carries that same beauty.