The Promise of a Laid Down Life
Life can be plain difficult.
Illness sidelines us. Debt tightens its shackles. Loving families morph into enemies.
When our legs are weary from running, and our lungs burn from the pressure, its tempting to pick up the shovel of despair and dig a hole to bury our treasure of hope for someone else to find.
Let's be real. It can be hard to press on. Yet, there's something transformative about facing the battle and giving all of ourselves on terrain where we think we don't own conquering shoes.
God knows something about the trusting sacrifice, and he entrusted Elijah with a nugget of gold truth. If we knew Elijah and learned what he expected out of a poor widow in the name of God, we may have been offended by his audacity.
Elijah was hiding from the wicked rulers of the land in the wilderness. The drought that God had called him to proclaim caused the brook that could have quenched his thirst to dry up. He was parched, hiding in a water barren land looking for a solution.
So what does Elijah do? Logically thinking, he finds the worst candidate to give him a hand: A poor suffering widow. He commands her to give him her and her son's last meal before they succumbed to the horrors of famine. It would be the ultimate sacrifice...a mother giving her dying child's last morsel of food to a crazy prophet.
But crazier still is this: She did it. God had already told her to make it happen...against any sound, human reasoning. She took Elijah's word not to be afraid. She stretched herself beyond the pain that she thought was her reality and laid down all she had in the face of death. And the lie that she and her son would perish shattered as her flour jar miraculously never had a bottom and her oil can never ceased to be full. Heaven invaded and made the impossible a reality.
There's revelation here if we could look past our current circumstance.
When our money seems tight, we can give to someone who needs it more. When we are too busy to get anything done, we can sacrifice our time to someone more desperate. When we cry for our dreams to come alive and someone gets what we ached for before us we can rejoice the loudest. Though our wallet may be empty, our own projects appear endless, and it takes everything within us to give voice to someone else's victory, the laying down of ourselves has made a path. It has expanded our capacity to receive beyond our wildest imaginations. When we move out of the way and let God, we stretch and make room for the miracle.
Like Jacob, many of us are running terrified with a blessing tucked in our back pocket. There is no better time to rest your head on the Rock. Lay all of your weary self under the wide open unknown. Risk everything for a truth you can't see. And soon...very soon the heavens will open, the healing oil will flow over every hard place and Jacob's cry will resound in every aching cavern of your life: "GOD is in this place,- truly. And I didn't even know it!"