Elijah was on the run. A fugitive. He’d shot his mouth off
to a guy who had the power and the nastiness to kill him for it. So Elijah was
in hiding, in fear of his life.
He was out in the bush, in the wild, in a hiding place he’d
found near a creek. This little creek became his water supply. Food was harder
to come by, at one stage he was eating meat and bread that had fallen from the
beaks of crows.
Elijah couldn’t go home for fear he’d be killed. He couldn’t
go anywhere near his home town. And when the creek stopped running, things were
getting desperate.
He headed for a nearby town, and approached a woman out
gathering firewood on the outskirts of this township. He discovered that she
was a widow, with a son at home. Her livelihood was dependant on a small patch
of land where she grew food. But this area had been in a long drought, and her
financial situation was dire. This widow and her son were close to starvation.
And here was Elijah, close to starvation himself, asking for food.
The situation seemed hopeless for everyone involved…
This is a story found in the Bible. The interesting bit is
that the Bible says that it was God who told Elijah to go and give King Ahab
the unpopular message that put his life in danger. It was God who told him to
head into hiding in the wild. It was God who directed him to the town he went
to, and to the widow he met.
Why would God do this? Send him into a situation that seemed
hopeless? To the one person who was most unable to provide Elijah with
assistance?
It turns out to be a wonderful story of trust and
generosity. The widow used her last bit of flour and oil to make some bread. Even
though she and her son were hungry, she fed this strange man of God named Elijah
first, and found from that point on that her flour never ran out, her oil never
ran out, she was able to keep on feeding Elijah and her son and herself for a
long time.
It never ceases to amaze me how God is able to use the most
unlikely people to come to the rescue, and to do the work of God in the most
hopeless of situations. Think no further than Mother Teresa, or Oscar
Schindler, or Martin Luther King Jnr, or Ghandi, or Nelson Mandela. Ordinary
people able to extraordinary things amidst the most hopeless of situations.
Every day, all around you, God is using unlikely people,
everyday ordinary people just like you, and me, to accomplish great things and
bring light into darkness, to bring hope into hopelessness, to bring love into
a world that is hungry for it.
It just takes a trusting heart, and a generous spirit; a
resolve of kindness and mercy and justice.
And it often leads to a miracle.
www.salvationarmy.org.au/mornington
